KEY POINTS:
A recent study that said New Zealand was the second-most "hacked" country in the world has come under fire from computer users.
TippingPoint, a company that sells internet security systems, issued a study published yesterday in Computerworld which said one in 730 people in New Zealand had been a victim of a computer "hack attack".
The UK took top place in the widely reported study with one hack for every 683 people.
The study said Australia had one hack per 871 people, Taiwan one per 1627 and Singapore one per 1642.
Attacks on the New Zealand government domains (.govt.nz) made them the eighth most-attacked government sites in the world, with 17 hacks last year.
Local bloggers were sceptical about the study. One told the scambusters website it seemed more like "a press release than a news story".
On the same site a blogger, named Foggyone, said the study should have defined what it meant by hacking.
"If it is hacking [breaking into websites illegally] as we know it then the figure looks like pure BS to me."
Just because a website ends with .nz it does not mean it's hosted in New Zealand, a source in the industry said.
"So, what is a New Zealand website [in this study]?"
He said for hackers to attack there had to be an infrastructure where businesses and government departments were linked to the internet, which was not the case in many third world countries.
Websites in English were more likely to be attacked than those in obscure languages. He said many "studies" on internet security were issued by companies that sold internet security, and that raised concerns about their credibility.
- NZPA
