Data-mining experts from two American universities, including those of Indian-origin ranked 44 nations based on vulnerability to Cyber crimes. India, along with China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea ranked among the nations most vulnerable to damaging cyber attacks, according to scientists from the University of Maryland and Virginia Tech in the United States.

The United States was ranked the 11th safest of 44 nations studied, while several Scandinavian countries including Denmark, Norway and Finland were ranked among the best protected from cyber crimes.

Lead author VS Subrahmanian, a professor at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) said, “Our goal was to characterize how vulnerable different countries were, identify their current cyber security policies and determine how those policies might need to change to lower exposure to such attacks.”

The researchers, including B Aditya Prakash, assistant professor at Virginia Tech in US conducted a two-year-long study that analyzed more than 20 billion automatically generated reports that were collected from 4 million machines each year worldwide.

Their rankings were, in part, based on the number of machines attacked in a country and the number of times each machine was attacked. Machines using Symantec anti-virus software automatically generated these reports, but only when a machine’s user opted in to provide the data.

While machines in the US faced most threats from trojans, viruses and worms; misleading software such as fake anti-virus programs and disk cleanup utilities were far more common in the US compared with other countries. The results suggest that US efforts to reduce cyber threats should focus on education to recognize and avoid misleading software.

The findings include economic and educational data gathered by UMD’s Centre for Digital International Government, for which Subrahmanian serves as director. Subrahmanian discussed the findings at a panel discussion hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington on Wednesday.