Far East servers offer hackers soft target

Servers hosted in South Korea and China are the most vulnerable to attack from cyber-criminals after the US, according to research released this week.

New York-based Predictive Systems said that ignorance of security issues in the Far East is compromising internet safety for surfers all over the world.

According to the group, US-based servers endure half (49 per cent) of all cyber-attacks - hardly surprising given that it has the highest internet population in the world, followed by South Korea (17 per cent) and China (15 per cent).

Non-technically advanced countries and those "very high up on the security evolutionary scale" are "more likely to see their servers attacked," said Predictive's senior security analyst, Richard Smith.

Smith said that South Korea, with its high bandwidth penetration, was particularly vulnerable.

The company used 54 sensors to monitor 12 million 'events', including emails, file sharing or websites offered by a server, for vulnerabilities and attacks in the last quarter of 2001.

Smith added that there was no way of determining where the hackers were actually based.