The Threat Landscape in South America

One region of the world I haven’t written extensively about before is South America.  Recently I had the opportunity to visit a couple of countries in South America to visit customers and discuss the threats they see in their environments. This is part 1 in a series of articles that will focus on threats found in several locations including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay. All of these articles are based on new data published in the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 15 and previous volumes.

As seen in Figure 1, several locations in South America have malware infection rates (CCM) higher than the worldwide average, while a few locations have infection rates lower than the worldwide average.  In the fourth quarter of 2012 (4Q12) Bolivia had the highest infection rate with 9.4 systems infected for every 1,000 that the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) scanned there.  The worldwide average in 4Q12 was 6.0 and Uruguay had the lowest infection rate of the locations examined with a CCM of 3.1. But infection rates in the region changed dramatically in the first half of 2013. Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela all saw infection rate increases during the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13). Peru’s malware infection rate increased from 9.4 in 1Q13 to 17.0 in 2Q13, a 45 percent increase in ninety days. Ecuador saw a 27 percent increase in its infection rate in 2Q13 while Bolivia saw a 29 percent increase in the same period. Read more