UK's a very popular target for EMEA cyberspies – report

Malware attacks, especially in Europe, nearly doubled in the first half of 2014, according to a new report.

Government, financial services, telecommunications and energy were the most targeted sectors – collectively making up more than half of attacks detected by security vendor FireEye.

The UK (17 per cent) followed by Germany with (12 per cent) were the two European countries most commonly targeted by malware-flinging, spear-phishing cyberspies.

Targets in Saudi Arabia (10 per cent), Turkey (9 per cent) and Switzerland (8 per cent) made up the remainder of the top five.

The report is based on data from the FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence cloud about so-called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Other vendors say FireEye's figures are in line what they are seeing.

"APTs most often start with advanced email attacks such as spear-phishing and longlining which con recipients into clicking a malicious link that gives the attacker control of the recipients PC or device," said Mark Sparshott, EMEA director at Proofpoint.

"[T]his new report correlates with Proofpoint's research in early September which found that unsolicited email destined for recipients in the UK is proportionally almost three times more likely to contain a malicious URL than the United States, Germany or France." ®