Egypt the main countries for creating Trojans designed to steal passwords

Egypt mentioned in top ten countries for creating PSW Trojans

Anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Labs has identified Egypt as one of the main countries responsible for creating Trojans designed to steal passwords

In conference held in Moscow that discussed the present and future state of cybercrime around the world, Egypt was mentioned in the top ten countries for creating PSW Trojans in 2009. PSW Trojans refers to a family of Trojans that are typically designed to steal passwords and log-in details from victims

China was found to be the main country creating of such Trojans (63%), followed by Russia (12%) and then Germany, India and Turkey (4%). Egypt, the United States, Ukraine, Mexico and France completed Kaspersky's top ten at 3%.

In an interview with Aleks Gostev, director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab, he stated that while Egypt made the list the region is not typically known for the creation of malware based on the firm's statistics compiling results from "tens of millions" of computers around the world. Gostev added that Egypt was, in fact, one of the biggest victims of cybercrime in 2008, but in 2009 Egyptian users were attacked a lot less in comparison.

"In terms of the creation of malware, we know single instances of malware creation in this region. For a number of business reasons, Turkey is not included in the Middle East in terms of our statistics, but there is, surprisingly enough, a lot of malware being written in Turkey today. I think the reason that there isn't that many virus writers in these countries might be cultural," Gostev explained.

Culture is the same reason, he believes, that best explains the contrast between China and India - while both have high internet populations. there is an overwhelming number of malware coming from China but India is responsible for "exponentially less".

Stefan Tanase, senior security researcher for the EEMEA region, also weighed in on the issue by explaining that the wealth of the country played a huge factor, along with the level of education and opportunities given to young graduates. "If someone has a passion for IT, they have a choice of going to the good side or joining the bad side."