Microsoft’s News Center in UK recently reported the growing attacks on UK computers by the cyber criminals. As technology is advancing, cyber criminals too are getting smarter. As a result, the incidents of cyber crime is increasing across the globe. And now the activities of cyber criminals are increasing in the UK.
The report says,
“Cyber criminals have intensified attacks on the UK, a new report has revealed, with the number of computers being infected by viruses surging at the end of last year.”
The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report that was released on Thursday also mentions that
“…cyber criminals are using videos and other digital media to customise their attacks on PCs and entice people into downloading harmful software.”
How big are the numbers of the attacks by cyber criminals
According to Tim Rains, the Director of Security at Microsoft, who is also the co-author of the report, Microsoft’s software is now blocking more than 10m attacks a day. This is a total of more than 4bn last year. As per the study, cyber-criminals are using social media as their popular tool for such crimes.
Tim mentions that,
“We know from our data that criminals target social media. You can see that they trick people into disclosing their user names and passwords, and then they attack your friends and contacts.”
Malware infections are determined using a key industry measure that calculates number of computers cleaned per 1,000 scanned (CCM). This same measurement criterion was applied to UK computers and it was found that the number that was 4.3 in the previous quarter; has now increased to 15.9 in the fourth quarter of 2015. There was very small increase in the percentage of UK computers that were found to have encountered malicious software, which was from 11.9% to 13.9%. The cyber criminals are very commonly using the Trojan programs that are disguised as “safe” programs to infect the computers in the UK.
Since it is possible to find out the attacks; but not the cyber criminals, Tim and other authors of the report ask users to be safe. He mentions,
“Microsoft is leading the way in protecting people. We get data from so many places on our cloud platform build intelligence into our products to protect them. Make sure you have up-to-date virus protection from a trusted vendor, while a good firewall will deflect a lot of attacks. Crucially, don’t open attachments in an email unless you know the person who sent it.”
Read the complete report on Microsoft News Center.
