Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Why is Korea a heaven for cybercriminals?


Korea shows in the top of many statistics tracking spam, phish, zombies, or other various kinds of cybercrimes. Why is this?

There are few apparent reasons - the dominance of the Windows OS in Korea, anecdotal lack of interest in cybersecurity, and state-of-the-art Internet infrastructure make Korea a top choice for cybercriminals. The numbers showing Korea as one of the top producers of Internet threats is not due to Koreans’ bad manners or nature. In fact, most of the attacks originating from Korea are not even caused by Koreans - instead, criminals from all over the world target Korean computers and try to create zombie networks with Korean computers just because they are guaranteed high throughput and efficiency of their attacks.

Because roughly 14 million of the nation’s 15.5 households are connected to always-on high-speed Internet, Korea makes a prime target for virus and worm viruses. The Korean government even plans to increase the speed of the Internet to 100 megabits per second by 2010, about 50 times faster than the current speed.

Korea has done a great job in creating an exemplary Internet infrastructure and has achieved the highest broadband penetration in the world. But with success comes responsibility, and the Korean government should take steps to educate and protect technologically the network they have created.

Cybercrime is based on any form of illegal act for which knowledge of computer technology is essential for either its perpetration, investigation, or prosecution. With korea's great penetration on the highest broadband in the world, they should also keep up with the e-security in order to protect the rights of the public users.

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