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Dubai: There may be only two types of internet users in the UAE, according to recent figures: those who think the internet is dangerous, and those who don't care.
In a survey of 400 visitors to last November's GITEX Shopper, 75 per cent do not shop online because they think the internet is "unsafe" and "too risky." The survey was conducted by Symantec, which makes internet security software.
"The vast majority said we don't feel safe at all. We think it's unsafe," said Con Mallon, a marketing director at Symantec.
"That's probably more extreme than we're seeing in other areas of the world, and that might simply be a cultural attitude that people are a little more reticent here. Trust is not necessarily given. It's got to be earned."
No protection
The survey also showed the 78 per cent of respondents who do shop online do so without any type of protection.
Symantec said that is an increase of 31 per cent from a year before, and if things seem to be getting worse, it might be because they are.
Mallon said Symantec has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of online threats in the last year, due in part to the rise in social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.
"A lot of people think that hackers and the bad guys set the agenda, they don't really," he said. "We as society, we set the agenda. And like good criminal, or bad criminal, they just see the opportunity to exploit."
He said there was no correlation to the increase in threats with the release of the Vista operating system, and Microsoft has done a better job with Vista than previous operating systems in terms of security.
He also pointed out that a focus on bad news stories might also be feedings the public's fears, but he said that websites like eBay or banks that offer services online were still relatively safe.
While only a small percentage of respondents, 8 per cent, said they had been the victim of fraudulent activity, regional statistics from TrendMicro show that a large number of computers in the UAE have been compromised, said Justin Doo, the companies regional managing director.
Bot attack
TrendMicro, who also tracks malware statistics in the Middle East, said that over 210,000 computers in the UAE, some of them in corporate networks, were infected by bots in 2007. Bots are small programs that are downloaded to personal computers and turn them into "zombies," which can be controlled by someone else remotely.
Networks of bot-infected computers, called botnets, can be used to generate massive amounts of unwanted and potentially hazardous emails (spam), block web access or capture user information by recording what they type.
The infected computers in the UAE generated over 54 billion pieces of spam last year. In a 24-hour period last week, over 31,000 bot-infected PCs in the UAE generated over 149 millions pieces of spam.
Doo said TrendMicro gets its numbers by monitoring the activity that bots cause.
According to Symantec's survey, 80 per cent of respondents did not know what a botnet was and only 46 per cent where aware of the threat posed by spam, which can be designed to steal, or "phish," personal information.
According to Symantec, the UAE ranked 40th in number of botnet infected computers, 66th for phishing, and 51st as a source of spam. TrendMicro's stats also placed the UAE in the top 60 for bot-infected countries.
Financial effect
Doo also said spam was likely to have a financial effect on telecom operators, since the spam was sitting on the telecom's servers and moving over their networks, and that small and medium enterprises, which often do not have strong security in place, were part of the problem.
"People are not aware of what they're doing and may not have sufficient security enabled," he said, adding that the governments should take a stronger role in addressing the problem, mainly through education.
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