This article is more than 1 year old

Cybercrooks set up shop in Canada

Blame Canada

Canada is on its way to becoming an unlikely hotbed of cybercrime.

As hosting providers in China and Eastern Europe have begun to clean up their act, mostly in response to external pressure, cybercrooks have begun looking to countries with better online reputations, such as Canada.

As a result, the number of Canadian servers hosting phishing sites increased four-fold last year alone, making it second only to Egypt in terms of the growth of cybercrime activity, net security firm Websense reports. In addition, Canada witnessed a 53 per cent increase in the number of command and control servers of bot networks.

The density of malicious websites has decreased across the world over recent months but Canada's decline has been markedly slower, Websense adds.

The overall increase in badness north of the border has propelled Canada from 13th spot in the cybercrime league last year towards a provisional sixth this year. Websense concludes that ISPs and the government in Canada need to team up to nip the problem in the bud, perhaps running the same sort of botnet takedown operations as recent US crackdowns against the Rustock and Coreflood cybercrime networks in recent months. ®

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