France occupies the 4th place of the countries at the origin of the computer threat: how to explain it?

If France is in a very good place in the ranking of countries at the origin of the computer threat ahead of Russia, it remains very far behind the Netherlands and Germany at European level.

It is by analyzing the anonymized data of its users all over the world that Kaspersky experts have been able to identify the main trends in terms of computer threats, and the figures by country. We thus learn that in terms of origin of threats, France comes in fourth position. So as not to mislead anyone, let’s keep in mind that when talking about infection, we are talking about that of the servers from which the attacks are launched.

France, just ahead of Russia

Let us stay precisely on the sources of threats. As soon as a Kaspersky user is attacked by an online threat, the company detects its source. By source, understand here the location of the object detected by a WebAntivirus component. And using this data, Kaspersky was able to establish that the share of incidents caused by servers hosted in France was 1.44% for the last quarter (April-June 2022).

This still corresponds to 9.78 million incidents listed. France is at the foot of the podium, far behind Germany (9.18%), the Netherlands (33.63%) and the United States (34.9%).

Russia, for its part, ranks fifth, concentrating 1.33% of incidents. Remember that this is only data recovered by Kaspersky. They thus represent a trend, not an absolute affirmation.

Vulnerabilities in search engines and plugins, still massively exploited

Let’s go into a little more detail, first by studying web threats. Search engine attacks remain the main vectors for spreading malware. Social engineering is still on the rise. The technique, which tricks the user into downloading malware onto their device, occurs when the user in question believes they are downloading a legitimate program.

Over the last quarter, Kaspersky detected 25 million different web threats on the computers of French participants. 19% of users were thus attacked over this period, which remains a small proportion (127^e world market), compared to Ukraine (40.9% of users), severely affected; Moldova (39.9%), Greece (39.8%), the Philippines (39.6%) and Bulgaria (38.9%), which constitute the top 5.

In addition to social engineering, there is the exploitation of vulnerabilities in search engines and their plugins (drive by download). These attacks occur by visiting an infected website, without the knowledge of the user. Today they remain in the majority, with fileless malware remaining the most dangerous, since their malicious code uses the registry or WMI registrations (” Windows Management Instrumentation ”) for persistence. They then leave no unique objects for static analysis on disk.

The French, less affected by local cyber incidents

Next to that, there are local threats. ” Local infection statistics for personal computers are a very important indicator Kaspersky notes. Worms and infected files cause most incidents. Cyber ​​experts advise equipping yourself with an antivirus, a firewall, an anti-rootkit functionality and setting up control over removable devices such as USB keys, CDs or DVDs, that facilitate the spread of malware.

Between April and June 2022, Kaspersky detected 12.6 million local incidents on French participating computers. 12.8% of users based in France were attacked by these local threats over the last quarter. France points at 139^e ranking of the most affected countries in number of users, far behind Turkmenistan (55.5%), Tajikistan (54.1%), Afghanistan (51.8%), Yemen (51.6%) and Uzbekistan (49.9%), which form the top 5.

^{_{Source: Kaspersky Report}}