Canada Becoming Cyber Criminal Breeding Ground

Canada is becoming a new hotspot for cybercrime, according to an analysis by information protection company Websense. In a company blog, Patrik Runald listed the signs that Canada's cybercrime activity is heating up.

Among those:

• the number of Canadian servers hosting phishing sites jumped 319 percent in the last year. Only Egypt experienced a greater jump in "crimeware" hosting sites.
• In eight months, Canada has seen a 53 percent increase in bot networks. In a comparison with the United States, France, Germany, and China, Canada came in second for amount of bot networks.
• Canada's decline in malicious networks is "tremendously slower" than in other countries.
• In a recent Websense threat report, Canada jumped from 13 for hosting cybercrime up to six.

The blog post speculates that Canada is picking up as hackers move their networks away from highly scrutinized places like China and Eastern Europe, which are notorious spots for cybercriminals. 

Runald asks, "More malicious content is being hosted in Canada than ever before. How will the public and private sector protect Canada? And, will the Canadian government be able to take down major Internet crime networks--similar to when the U.S. brought down Rustock and Coreflood?"