US hackers are the busiest in the world...

net1

COUNTRIES on the US Government's Cyber Terrorist Watch List generated less than 1 per cent of all attacks on computer systems in the past six months, according to Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report. In terms of overall volume, the United States topped the top-10 list of attacking countries, with 35.4 per cent of recorded cyber-attacks originating in the US. South Korea was second at 12.8 per cent and China third at 6.9 per cent. The others were Germany (6.7 per cent), France (4 per cent), Taiwan (3.9 per cent), Canada (3.2 per cent), Italy (3 per cent), Great Britain (2.2 per cent) and Japan (1.8 per cent).

These nations were responsible for the origin of 80 per cent of all cyber-attacks, according to Symantec's analysis of real-time hacks detected by a sample of 400 companies deploying more than 1000 intrusion detection systems and firewalls in more than 30 countries. Researchers found that countries on the Cyber Terrorist Watch List produced no severe events against companies in the sample. And no verifiable cases of cyber-terrorist attacks were detected during the six months from July 1, 2002 to December 31, 2002. Indonesia and Iran were the two main attackers on the watch list, replacing Kuwait and Egypt, which topped the list in the prior six-month period. These four countries alone accounted for almost all the attack activity among watch list countries.

Some quite interesting stats from the folks at Symantec... Something that does seem a tad odd is that Canada and Italy made the 'list' and Brazil and Argentina did not...