Symantec names Shaoxing, China as world's malware capital
By Donald Melanson 
posted March 29th 2010 6:41AM
posted March 29th 2010 6:41AM
It's not the sort of title any city's looking for, but Symantec has now given Shaoxing, China the dubious honor of being the world's malware capital, saying that it accounts for more targeted attacks than any other city. In fact, the company found that while close to 30 percent of all malicious attacks came from China (making it the number one country), 21.3 percent came just from Shaoxing. It was followed by Taipei at 16.5 percent, and London at 14.8 percent. Following China in the country rankings is Romania with 21.1 percent of attempted attacks (most of those are said to be commercial fraud), and the United States at 13.8 percent. That's actually just part of a larger report by Symantec's MessageLabs division, which details everything from the most common types of email attachments (.XLS and .DOC are neck and neck for the lead) to the percentage of emails that contain a virus of phishing attack (one in 358.3 and one in 513.7, respectively). Dive into the PDF linked below for the complete details.
I'm from Shaoxing, like no joke.
Should i be proud?
@gbj
personally...I would LMAO!! :)
@Atkins No kidding, if we play the malware produced per internet user game, it'll be more shocking.
I've always known China is the origin of a huge portion of malware, but that number is huge. Reports like this make me want to block any connections coming to or from China forever.
China has piracy problems?!?!
Nigeria SCAM, hahahahah i get it a lot... Ebay and Craigslist, i laugh at people who goes for that Nigerian Scam!
I'm sorry for being offtopic, but can there companies finally stop drawing Yugoslavia on their maps? It has been almost 19 years since Yugoslavia ceased to exist.
@(Unverified)
Also: the Soviet union
This is probably due in part to the large IE6 userbase in China (66%), and Asia in general. Hopefully wider adoption of UTF-8 will allow other browsers to be viable there; it's a pain to program sites that work with IE6.
Could it be that these numbers indicate where are the most unprotected computers? I mean it would really take just one computer to start spreading a malware. One could easily target those networks at the beginning, even using rdp or something. Or are they able to pinpoint every source at Symantec?
My hometown is an hour drive away from Shaoxing...and to me Shaxing is just an old-fashioned southern town where people still travel by small boats, kind of like Venice...It's famous for its Chinese rice wine, a.k.a Shaoxing wine...I guest the governor there just think that the wine is not gonna make them world famous so they come up with the idea of making malware...to attract tourists.
It's looks a bit strange. Both Taipei and London are monster cities in their own region. It's understandable that they also serve as malware center. But ShaoXing is far from that. There are many more advanced cities around it. I wounder if there is any special about this city that makes it the origin of malware.
@Atkins
I can cripple thier facilities. There's always a way in. No system is safe
With a country that's fully endorsing mass school of hackers for electronic espionage and theft it's unsurprising that they're also the capital for the majority of malware as well.
The "Vyagrra" and lawn clippings sold as chinese herbs is a dead giveaway!