European and North American Countries are Least Exposed to Cyberattacks, New Study Reveals

A new report from PasswordManagers.co highlights the exposure of countries worldwide to the growing wave of cyberattacks. In its Cybersecurity Exposure Index (CEI) 2020, the company analyzed and rated 108 countries based on exposure to malicious attacks including trojans, ransomware, cryptocurrency mining and phishing.

Finland was the least exposed to cybercrime, according to the report, followed by Denmark, Luxembourg, Australia and Estonia. The most exposed country for cyberattacks was Afghanistan, but countries such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, Palestine and Venezuela were close behind.

The survey also assessed the level of commitment in each country by using the 2018 Global Cybersecurity Index that classifies countries” approach to cybersecurity issues and cybercrime based on legal, technical, organizations, building capacity and cooperation.

“Where risk is the probability (i.e. the chance that an event or situation will happen), exposure is the extent to which risk can have an affect,” researchers said. “With exposure defined as the fact of experiencing or being affected by something, we chose to research the frequency of malicious attacks alongside the level of cybersecurity commitment to accurately assess each country”s exposure to cybercrime.”

Measuring the exposure score of each state with a rating system from 0 to 1, nearly 71% of European countries classify in the low or very low exposure groups, with a score of 0.329. North America received the second-lowest exposure score, of 0.462, with 66.67% of countries classified in the moderate, low, and very low exposure groups.

40% of South American countries classified in the high and very high exposure groups, with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Columbia scoring between 0.590 and 0.807. In the Asia-Pacific region, Australia was named the least exposed country, followed by Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and Qatar. However, on a global scale, countries in Asia-Pacific account for 40% of high and very high exposure groups.

The report shows that 75% of African countries are classified in the high and very high exposure groups, accounting for 36.67% of all high exposure countries globally.