Spam, ransomware Bangladesh's two major cyber threats

Spam has been identified as Bangladesh's biggest cyber threat in the year 2020, according to a latest report of the government.

Spam is unsolicited emails, most often send in bulk, and it is one of the most prevalent and persistent cyber threats in the world.

Bangladesh ranked 29th among the spam sources by country, and also accounts for 7.1 per cent of the world's spam volume, according to a report of the state-run Bangladesh e-Government Computer Incident Response Team (BGD e-Gov CIRT).

Ransomware has been marked as the second biggest risk, which was in eighth place last year, it revealed.

Spam along with phishing and ransomware is the most frequently encountered cyber threat in Bangladesh, having the most significant impact, the report mentioned.

Phishing, malware, information leakage, and insider threat have been identified as third, fourth, fifth and sixth biggest cyber threats respectively.

Besides, identity theft, web-based attack, data breach and denial of service were shown in the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth position in terms of the biggest cyber threats.

Cyber espionage was ranked 15th among the country's top threats, the report mentioned.

The BGD e-GOV CIRT, under the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, published 'Bangladesh Cyber Threat Landscape' report by collecting information from critical information infrastructures.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of spam and phishing in the overall Bangladesh cyber threat landscape has become significantly higher, it further added.

Other threats in Bangladesh cyber threat landscape follow international threat landscape and change in the ranking is due to spam, phishing and ransomware climbing to higher positions, and web application attacks going down and inevitably leading to change in ranking to other threats, as per the report.

Spam

In November 2020, the average daily spam volume was around 210.54 billion globally, which corresponds to around 84.83 per cent of the total daily email volume.

In the same month, the top spam sources by country were the United States, Russian Federation, China and Brazil.

Ransomware

Ransomware is a malicious software that either encrypts files or locks the home screen to demand ransom from its victims to access the files and device.

The primary group of threat agents for ransomware is cybercriminals, nation states, and corporations. The overall trend of ransomware activity increased in 2020.

Phishing

Phishing attacks are attempts by cybercriminals to capture sensitive information by masquerading to be banks, social media platforms, and other official entities, otherwise known as social engineering.

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