China-US: 5:1

Chinese users are five times more likely than US users to be targeted by hackers exploiting the recently patched bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The attacks used against Google and many other companies and now to be found on hundreds of sites, are targeted at Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the nearly nine-year-old browser bundled with Windows XP. While less than 10% of American computer users run IE6, 50% of the PCs in China use that browser to access the Internet, according to the most recent data from NetApplications.

Other sources say that China's computer users are even more vulnerable to the growing attacks. StatCounter, an Irish metrics vendor, pegged IE6's share of the China market last month at 62%, nearly 10 times greater than the 6.4% share the old browser enjoyed in the US.

It's ironic that Chinese users are more likely to fall victim to the attacks, since by most accounts the original exploit was created in China by Chinese hackers. Microsoft patched the IE vulnerability on January 21, rolling out one of its rare "out-of-band" emergency updates.

Source: Computerworld.