VietNamNet Bridge – According to the latest survey by Australia-based AVG Internet security firm, Vietnam is among the top ten countries that are the least safe for Internet surfing. Bridge – According to the latest survey by Australia-based AVG Internet security firm, Vietnam is among the top ten countries that are the least safe for Internet surfing.

AVG looked at the number of Internet attacks worldwide for the final week of July 2010, as well as the number of AVG installations per country. From this, AVG was able to work out the probability of an average web surfer being attacked in a specific country. The research involved taking data from 127 million AVG installations across 144 countries.

Turkey tops the least with one out of every ten computers being attacked by a virus or malware (ratio 1/10). Other countries in the top ten are Russia (1/15), Armenia (1/24), Azerbaijan (1/39), Bangladesh (1/41), Vietnam and Laos (1/42), Portual (1/43), USA (1/48), Ukraine, Pakistan (1/48).

The ten safest countries for surfing the Internet are: Sierra Leone (1/696), Nigeria (1442), Japan (1/403), Togo (1/359), Namibia (1/353), Belize (1/302), Madagascar (1/283), Mozambique (1/264), Zambia (1/262) and Slovakia. What is the ratio for Slovakia?

“This research tells us a lot about the typical behavior of web surfers worldwide. Internet users in Turkey, Russia, and some Central Asian, the Caucasus, Southeast Asian, and Indian sub-continent states show disproportionately higher rates of being attacked than the global average of 1 in 73,” said AVG spokesperson, Roger Thomson.

“Our research should also serve as a wake-up call to people going abroad. Very often you may access your files on a computer that doesn’t belong to you, or you may access a shared network - neither of which incidentally are things we would ever recommend. In those cases, we would urge that web users exercise caution, not only when it comes to going online in our top 50 risk list, but in general.”

Globally, North America is the most dangerous region (1/73), followed by Europe (1/72), Asia (1/102), Africa (1/108), and South America (1/164).

PV