Compare cybersecurity risks in the U.S. and another country.

The U.S. is considered a “non-serious cyber crime country.” The crimes committed here are less volatile—mostly involving digital piracy and harmless spam mail. However, digital piracy is an ever-growing cyber crime throughout the country. Along with other wealthy nations (GDP-wise) such as Canada, China, and Japan, the U.S. shows a decent amount of BitTorrent trackers (P2P servers that host a considerable amount of pirated content) and file sharing client downloads, in addition to the many instances of advance fee fraud, phishing servers, phishing emails, and distribution of malware. Furthermore, the wealth of these countries also indicates that they have a broad user base on the internet, so this explains why they commit the most digital piracy, and why they are more likely to receive spam mail.

Cybersecurity risks are more prevalent in nations like Nigeria, Paraguay, and Malaysia—the so-called “advance fee fraud specialists.” As the nickname suggests, these countries exhibit drastic amounts of advance fee fraud emails, a social engineering scheme that requires less technical skills to pull off than a malware attack or a phishing attack. Nigeria is the top offender when it comes to this type of crime, and the damages vary in severity. At the very least, one could lose about $200 or less. Worst case scenario, victims are kidnapped and held for ransom.

Other nations, such as Bolivia, India, and Senegal are labeled as “low cyber crime countries.” It is in countries such as these where the least cybersecurity risks occur due to their lack of resources and the less-than-satisfactory GDP, both of which are required to be in good standing in order to maintain a grounded internet infrastructure—all this leads to fewer users on the internet and less cybersecurity risk overall compared to countries like the U.S.

Moreover, nations like Argentina, Russia, and the United Kingdom exhibit more phishing crimes per capita, and thereby are given the nickname “phishing specialists.” These countries have plenty of active internet users due to their moderate GDP. Compared to the US, they remain at an average level of BitTorrent trackers, advance fee fraud, malicious emails, and spam, but they do exhibit a considerable amount of file sharing client downloads per capita. All in all, the level of cybersecurity risk in the U.S. does need to receive much more attention, but it is not as serious compared with other countries that do not have the means to provide a more secure cybersecurity infrastructure.

References

Kigerl, Alex. (2016). Cyber crime nation typologies: K-Means clustering of countries based on cyber crime rates. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 10(2).