London, United Kingdom, July 29th, 2021 — Avast (LSE:AVST), a global leader in digital security and privacy, today revealed that the overall chance of home PC users encountering a cyber threat has increased worldwide year over year. 

According to Avast’s latest Global PC Risk Report, in Britain, the likelihood of a home user encountering any type of PC malware is 23.26%. Compared to the global average, British home users have a slightly smaller risk of encountering all types of threats. 

“The risk ratio has increased worldwide for all malware attacks, and we can see that Britain is no exception. In the pandemic, the internet has been kind of a ‘life saver’ for many, empowering them to stay connected with loved ones during the lockdown, to attend virtual workout sessions, get-togethers, classes, and to work remotely. But cybercriminals have also taken notice of this, so we have seen a variety of tailored campaigns taking advantage of increased online activities, such as Covid-19 related attacks, sextortion campaigns, spyware, and ransomware,” commented Michal Salat, Director of Threat Intelligence at Avast.

The report also looks into the possibility of users facing ‘advanced’ threats, which Avast defines as more sophisticated or threats never seen before, designed to bypass common protection technologies included in security software, such as signatures, heuristics, emulators, URL filtering, and email scanning. For this type of threat, British home users have a 2.89% risk ratio.

The top 10 British regions in which home users are most at risk of encountering threats are:

The Global Scenario

Home users around the world have a 29.39% chance of encountering any type of PC malware, which represents an increase of around 5% compared to the previous year. The chances of users being targeted by an advanced threat are lower, but the proportion is similar to all threats, with consumers having a 5% chance of encountering an advanced threat (4.61% in the previous year). 

Geographies with more conflictive socio-political situations, such as the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, seem to be facing more risk in the online world as well.

The top 10 countries in which home users are most at risk of encountering threats are:

This report provides an overview of cyberattacks that happened within thirty days, giving a picture in time of the general risk users and businesses face globally and in different countries. 

Avast’s Global PC Risk Report provides a snapshot of H1 2021 cyberattacks looking at data from March 16, 2021 to April 14, 2021 and can be found in full here.

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Global and British Risk Ratio map images can be seen here.

Methodology 

The data included in this report is collected from Avast’s threat detection network, and represents a data snapshot, constructed with the threats Avast protected its PC users from during March 16, 2021 and April 14, 2021. In order to provide statistically relevant data, this report includes data from countries, territories and regions with a sample size of at least 10,000 computers belonging to home users that encountered threats during the month we collected the data, and at least 1,000 computers used by businesses. The data looks at total threats and advanced threats, evaluating the risk ratio for home and business users around the world.

To calculate the risk ratios for this report, we divided the number of computers where Avast’s protection layers stopped at least one threat, by the total number of computers Avast actively protected within the 30-day period.

When comparisons to the previous year were made, this refers to data from the exact same period of time, March 16, 2020 to April 14, 2020.