Computer security company Kaspersky Lab has said that most numebr of websites use dto spread malicious programs were from the US.

According to a study of malware for the second quarter 2011, kaspersky said that 87% of the websites used to spread malicious programs were concentrated in just 10 countries.

The first two places in the ‘top 10’ were occupied by the US (28.53%) and Russia (15.99%).

The Netherlands leads the way in reducing the number of malicious hosting sites: compared to the previous quarter, its share has fallen by 4.3 percentage points to 7.57%, said the company.

It said that the reduction is primarily due to the efforts of the Dutch police and includes the neutralising of botnets such as Bredolab and Rustock.

Kaspersky said that navigating the web remains the riskiest activity on the Internet with malicious URLs that serve exploit kits, bots, ransomware Trojans, etc. being the most frequently detected objects (65.44%) online.

Kaspersky Lab’s experts identified a number of important trends.

They found that countries could be seggregated into groups based on their local infection levels.

Among the high risk (41-60% unique users subject to web attacks) countries are: Oman, Russia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Belarus. Newcomers to this group in Q2 were Sudan and Saudi Arabia, while Kazakhstan dropped down a level.

The US at 40.2% is on the verge of joining the ‘high risk group’, but has been grouped under the ‘Average risk group’ now, which includes: China (34.8%), the UK (34.6%), Brazil (29.6%), Peru (28.4%), Spain (27.4%), Italy (26.5%), France (26.1%), Sweden (25.3%) and the Netherlands (22.3%).

There are 28 countries in the ‘safe-surfing countries’ (11.4-21%). This group comprises Switzerland (20.9%), Poland (20.2%), Singapore (19.6%) and Germany (19.1%). In the second quarter of 2011, five countries left this group, including Finland which entered a higher risk group with 22.1%, said Kaspersky.

India was among the top 10 countries in which users’ computers ran the highest risk of local infection. Every second computer in the country was at risk of local infection at least once in the past three months.

Kaspersky Lab Senior Virus Analyst Yury Namestnikov said over the last few years, India has been growing steadily more attractive to cybercriminals as the number of computers in the country increases steadily.

"Other factors that attract the cybercriminals include a low overall level of computer literacy and the prevalence of pirated software that is never updated," said Namestnikov.

"Botnet controllers see India as a place with millions of unprotected and unpatched computers which can remain active on zombie networks for extended periods of time."

The five safest countries in terms of the level of local infections are: Japan (with 8.2% of unique users affected), Germany (9.4%), Denmark (9.7%), Luxembourg (10%) and Switzerland (10.3%).

For the very first time in its history, the Top 10 rating of vulnerabilities includes products from just two companies: Adobe and Oracle (Java), with seven of those 10 vulnerabilities being found in Adobe Flash Player alone.

Microsoft products have disappeared from this ranking due to improvements in the automatic Windows update mechanism and the growing proportion of users who have Windows 7 installed on their PCs, said Kaspersky.

According to Kaspersky Lab’s experts, the number of mobile threats targeting different mobile platforms continues to increase exponentially.