Singapore

BEING waylaid for extortion, robbery and even ransom are nightmares usually associated with unsafe neighbourhoods and lonely roads. These are places best avoided, but unfortunately very few people heed the caution when visiting cyber equivalents of unsafe neighbourhoods when they travel on the information highway of the Internet.

As a result, as a study by cybersecurity provider, Symantec, puts it, never before in the history of human kind have people across the world been subjected to extortion on a massive scale as they are today. Sanjay Rohatgi, Symantec Asia-Pacific and Japan's senior VP, says that in recent years, cyber criminals have emerged to feed off the massive surge in the use of the Internet, targeting innocent users with a wide range of malware.