Washington: India, along with China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea ranked among the nations most vulnerable to damaging cyberattacks, according to scientists, including those of Indian-origin.The US ranked 11th safest, while several Scandinavian countries including Denmark, Norway and Finland ranked the safest, researchers said.
“Our goal was to characterise how vulnerable different countries were, identify their current cybersecurity policies and determine how those policies might need to change in response to this new information,” said lead author V S Subrahmanian, a professor at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).
The researchers, including B Aditya Prakash, assistant professor at Virginia Tech in US conducted a two-year study that analysed more than 20 billion automatically generated reports, collected from 4 million machines per year worldwide.The researchers based their rankings, in part, on the number of machines attacked in a given country and the number of times each machine was attacked.
Machines using Symantec anti-virus software automatically generated these reports, but only when a machine’s user opted in to provide the data.The findings include economic and educational data gathered by UMD’s Centre for Digital International Government, for which Subrahmanian serves as director.The researchers integrated all of the data to help shape specific policy recommendations for each of the countries studied, including strategic investments in education, research and public-private partnerships.
