Almost 30m cyberattacks were carried out in the UK during Q4 2018 according to new research from the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab.

Cybercriminals favoured web browsers as their primary method for spreading malicious programs in the UK and the firm detected and defended against over 12.1m different cyber threats between October and December of last year.

Overall, 16 per cent of those who used Kaspersky Security Next products were attacked by web-based threats which the company helped defend them from.

The number of attacks that occurred in the UK puts the country in 125th place worldwide when it comes to how dangerous it is to surf the web.

Local threats

While web-based threats were high local threats were more prevalent with Kaspersky Lab stopping more than 17.5m during Q4 2018 placing the UK 138th in the world.

Additionally the number of incidents caused by servers hosted reached 11.2m, putting the UK at sixth place worldwide.

The most common tactics used by cybercriminals to carry out attacks via browsers were implementing infections that exploited vulnerabilities in browsers and their plug-ins and social engineering.

When it came to local infection statistics, Kaspersky Lab found that worms and file viruses were used for the majority of such incidents.

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