Chinese Internet Security Report Claims Viruses Decreased In 2011

Chinese Internet security company Kingsoft published its latest Chinese Internet security report, stating that the number of new viruses decreased in 2011 while the attacks targeting Internet shopping in China continued to surge.

According to the statistics provided by Kingsoft, during 2011 its anti-virus software Kingsoft Duba detected about 12.3 million new viruses, which marked a decrease compared with 2010. For the entire country, about 4% to 8% of computers were attacked by viruses on a daily basis. Compared with 2010, the spread of viruses and trojans relied more on the Internet channel and 86.4% of them spread via downloading; and the number of those spread via mobile storage devices and web pages declined.

Meanwhile, phishing websites have become the most serious threat in China. During 2011, there were about 450,000 new phishing websites created in China; about 400 million to 1.1 billion phishing activities were blocked by Kingsoft Duba every month; and these phishing websites affected about 40 million to 70 million netizens in China. Of all the newly increased phishing websites in 2011, those imitated the Internet shopping website Taobao.com had the highest growth, accounting for 28.21% of the total. Of all the phishing websites, 81.82% located their servers in foreign countries.

Statistics from the cloud security center of Kingsoft Duba showed that in 2011, the anti-virus software protected 20 million Internet shopping activities on a daily basis, benefiting five million Chinese netizens on average each day.