The safest countries for Internet surfing are Serbia, Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic and Luxembourg, show the results conducted by Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions.

- The statistics collected from computers belonging to KSN subscribers show that users’ computers in the developing countries are at the highest risk of both local and web-borne infection. With local infections, the groups within the maximum and high risk brackets consist exclusively of developing countries. In the countries that fall into the maximum risk bracket, local threats are blocked on over 60% of all computers that have Kaspersky Lab’s security products installed on them, while the corresponding figure for the high risk bracket is 40-60%. IT penetration is increasing rapidly in these countries, and levels of IT security awareness may not always advance at the same pace,” explains Yury Namestnikov,

All the data was obtained from consenting participants of the Kaspersky Security Network which brings together millions of users of Kaspersky Lab’s products from 213 countries around the world.

According to the company’s research, in the first quarter of 2011, the number of web-borne attacks blocked stood at 254,932,299. Notably, 89% of all web resources used for hosting malware were detected in just 10 countries. The United States still tops this list – between January and March 2011, the share of malicious hosting sites in the US increased by 1.7 percentage points.

The bulk of the malicious content is located on compromised legitimate sites. The number of malicious hosting sites continued to fall in China and Germany, with the volume of web attacks originating from the two countries falling by 3.33 and 3.28 percentage points respectively compared to the final quarter of 2010.