OTTAWA — Whether it's by viruses, worms or phishing emails and texts, nearly half of all Canadians have been targeted by hackers at some point over the past year, according to a new report from an anti-virus software company.
The 2012 Norton Cyber-crime Report, released Wednesday, says more than 46 per cent of Canadians have re-ported attempts by hackers to try to obtain personal data over the past 12 months.
More than 8.3 million Canadians report they have been victims of cybercrime in the past year and 42 per cent of Canadian adults say they wouldn't know if their computer, tablet or phone was infected with a virus unless it crashed or slowed down dramatically.
Canadian's aren't being singled out, according to the re-port, which collected data from 24 countries.
More than 46 per cent of global respondents also re-ported that hackers had tried to coerce sensitive information from them within the past 12 months.
Despite new anti-virus soft-ware and tougher laws to protect consumers, hackers are becoming more dangerous than ever. According to the Norton study, hackers have started mining social net-works such as Facebook and have added new tools that al-low them to exploit software flaws on phones, tablets and computers in their attempts to scoop up more personal in-formation.
When those high-tech approaches aren't enough, hackers are turning to low-tech methods to implant computers with viruses and other nasty computer pro-grams.
In January, a scam in which callers pretending to be Microsoft employees offered to solve computer problems accounted for 70 per cent of all fraud complaints in Canada, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
The callers offered to help people clean a virus from their hard drives. In the process, they charged victims as much as $400, collected credit card information and gained access to personal files on the victims' computers.
Hacking accounted for more than $1.4 billion in losses to Canadians over the past 12 months, the study estimates.
Lynn Hargrove, Canadian director of consumer solutions for Symantec Corp., which publishes Norton anti-virus software, said consumers are becoming more savvy at preventing hackers from gaining access to their computers. But hackers are increasingly turning their attention to mo-bile phones and devices, especially as more people use cellular phones for banking and making electronic payments.
"Cyber criminals are looking at new ways to attack, and mobile is a really big platform that we are seeing," she said. "Obviously, that's a place that cyber criminals are going to attack. Cyber criminals are going to go where the biggest bang for their buck is."
Mobile has become the new frontier for hackers eager to collect bank account and credit card data from individuals. According to Norton, as many as 16 per cent of Canadians re-ported falling victim to mobile fraud over the past 12 months. That number could skyrocket as hackers further target mobile devices.
"It's a much different landscape," said Hargrove. "As we are seeing more cybercrime on a mobile de-vice, 54 per cent of Canadians are re-porting that they are accessing the Internet on that device and 74 per cent of Canadians don't have mobile security."
Hargrove said that 59 per cent of survey respondents were unaware that security programs exist for their mobile devices.
The study was released just days after hackers made public person-al information from more than one million iPhone and other Apple de-vices. The hackers claim to have personal information from more than 11 million mobile devices and say they may release more data in the coming weeks.
Last week, another group of hackers publicly released the bank records and personal credit histories of more than a million people. The hackers, who claim the data theft and subsequent posting of the in-formation on the Internet is a form of protest against big business and the banks, have promised that the release was only the first wave of a broader release.
The 2012 Norton Cybercrime Re-port is in its third year of publication. The survey asked questions of 13,018 online respondents from 24 countries, including 500 from Canada. The margin of error for the study results is plus 0.9 per cent at the 95 per cent level of confidence.
CYBERCRIME NUMBERS
Number of reported cybercrime victims in past 12 months
■ 8.3 million (Canada)
■ 556 million (global)
Online adults who have reported experiencing cybercrime
■ 46 per cent (Canada)
■ 46 per cent (global)
Total net costs of cybercrime
■ $1.4 billion (Canada)
■ $110 billion US (global)
Social network users who do not check links before sharing them with others
■ 15 per cent (Canada)
■ 20 per cent (global)
Online adults who don't understand the risk of cybercrime or how to protect themselves online
■ 21 per cent (Canada)
■ 28 per cent (global)
Source: 2012 Norton Cybercrime Report
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