WASHINGTON, March 20 (UPI) -- More hacker attacks originated in the United States than anywhere else last year, says a new survey of Internet security threats.
One third of all hacker attacks worldwide originated in the United States, according to Internet security giant Symantec Corp.'s 11th semi-annual Internet Security Threat Report, published Monday.
The report, which covers the period between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2006, also shows that U.S. hackers accounted for 31 percent of all malicious computer activity, more than any other country.
But when countries are ranked by malicious activity per Internet user, Israel was the highest, followed by Taiwan and Poland.
U.S. computer networks were the target of most denial of service, or DoS attacks -- in which servers are bombarded with requests for information from huge numbers of infected slave computers, known as 'bot-nets, causing them to crash.
Just over half of all such attacks were aimed at U.S. computers and their number overall rose by 11 percent.
Nearly a third of all detected DoS attacks in the United States and elsewhere were aimed at government networks, making it the most frequently targeted sector.
China had more infected slave computers than anywhere else -- 26 percent of the global total -- and a fifth of them, 5 percent of all the 'bot-net computers in the whole world, are in Beijing.
But most of the computers running the slave 'bot-nets -- 40 percent of the detected worldwide total -- are based in the United States, as are just over half of what Symantec calls "underground economy servers."
