The Netherlands often ranks among the highest in international indexes of economic freedom, human development, quality of life, and happiness but it appears Holland’s cyber defences have more holes than a block of Maasdam cheese as it also holds the dubious honour of having the highest rate of cyber-crime across Europe.
So says a report by Specops Software, which analysed the percentage of cloud provider attacks on Microsoft Azure and the monthly percentage of machines that encountered cryptocurrency mining, malware and ransomware across the EU.
It shows the Netherlands has the largest number of attacks (17.64%) across all areas, but predominately due to the large number of cloud provider incoming attacks (16.28%) to Microsoft Azure.
The Dutch are followed by Bulgaria (17.55%), Belarus (10.83%), Ukraine (10.35%), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (7.06%).
The UK is way down the list in 17th place (on 3.82%), below France (8th on 5.41%), Spain (12th on 4.47%) and Italy (14th on 4.19%), but just above Germany (18th on 3.61%).
Ireland is ranked as the least vulnerable country in Europe, and had the lowest cyber-crime encounter rate in every category, except cloud provider attacks – where there is 0.36% recorded incoming attacks on Azure, detected by Azure’s Security Centre.
Cryptocurrency encounters
On average, Belarus has the highest number of cryptocurrency mining encounters every month, with 0.42% of machines recording the issue. Next is Ukraine (0.33%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (0.25%) and Bulgaria (0.17%).
The least vulnerable country is Ireland, where only 0.01% of machines encountered cryptocurrency mining. The UK, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Germany and Netherlands are second least likely to encounter cryptocurrency mining, as only 0.02% of machines in each country had.
Malware encounters
Belarus also has the most malware encounters in Europe, with 10.17% of machines in the country encountering them each month on average. In second place is Ukraine (9.57%), followed by Bosnia (6.76%), Romania (5.92%) and Bulgaria (5.66%).
Once again, Ireland is the country with the least malware encounters, where only 0.7% of machines in the country encountered malware each month on average.
Finland (1.27%), Norway (1.33%), Netherlands (1.33%) and Denmark (1.35%) are among the countries least vulnerable to malware encounters.
Ransomware encounters
Some 0.09% of machines in Ukraine encountered malware on average every month, making it the most insecure country to malware encounters in Europe.
Belarus are second most vulnerable, with 0.06% of machines encountering malware, followed by Bosnia (0.05%), Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Greece and Croatia (0.04%).
Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and Finland encountered the smallest number of ransomware threats, with only 0.01% of machines facing them each month.
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