Do You Know Where the Internet is Most Dangerous?

Trustlook, the global leader of AI-powered cybersecurity has published an internet security map based on data they collected.

Trustlook provides cybersecurity support for over 150 million mobile devices worldwide, most of them from ubiquitous brands such as Huawei and Oppo. Having such a widespread presence provides Trustlook a global perspective on the state of mobile security.

Based on data collected during September 2018, Trustlook has discovered that China has the largest quantity of malware in the world, and that regions such as Africa and Oceania have the highest mobile infection rates.

China has the largest quantity of mobile malware in the world.

Trustlook collects mobile security data during the process of protecting user devices, scanning their phones or IoT devices for malicious applications and files. For data collection, different applications count as different samples but the same application in different devices count as the same sample; the resulting “malware count” of a region refers to the number of unique malware endemic there.

According to the data, China’s malware count is the highest, followed by the United States, Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil. In the following table, countries and regions are sorted by their malware counts.

The most obvious caveat is that these regions have higher counts because there are more users and applications. Markets such as China and the United States are frankly much larger than other sampling regions, motivating more malware diversity and development.

Therefore the data for malware count in each region is not as meaningful as it would appear at first glance. A deeper analysis of the data was required, to see if the regions with top malware counts are actually as dangerous as they seem.

Africa and Oceania have the highest malware concentration.

When discussing whether a region’s internet is safe, it makes more sense to measure the ratio of malware counts to data samples rather than the malware count. This way, we can better quantify the malware concentration of a particular region.

According to Trustlook’s analyses, the malware to sample ratio is highest in the Solomon Islands, followed by Palau, Haiti, and Burundi.

Surprisingly, China which has the highest malware count isn’t even in the top 30 when using the new metric. We can also see from the above table that there are no North American or European countries within the top 30 and only one country, Afghanistan, from Asia.

Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou cultivate the most malware samples

There is big differences between different cities in China in malware counts. Beijing, Chengdu and Guangzhou, and Shanghai lead the pack in having the most malware in their citizens’ mobile devices.

There are no boundaries inside a country’s internet, which is divided by different languages and cultures. It is hard to say these cities are more dangerous, and the reasons behind the virus number maybe because there are some common behaviors between their citizen, which means a typical group of users and people, and developers should pay attention to.

Trustlook’s mission is to defend every mobile device and everyone’s cybersecurity.

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