Bahrain: A Year Later

Last year, I reported on a flood of open proxies in Bahrain.

Starting in April, picking up in May, and bursting at the seems in June and July, I found hundreds of open proxies listed by the various proxy lists I raid hourly (I never actually scan for proxies. I collect everything I can find online - usually through Google - test, and report).

Bahrain was awash with open proxies. Then, in August, it stopped.

In the end I had tested almost 17,000 proxies and found more than 2200 open proxies. On closer inspection, most appeared to be public access points or some type of consumer grade router. Nearly all were owned (notice I didn't say "pwned") by Bahrain Telecomm.

One by one, the open proxies eventually went dark and that was that. There were a couple later in the Fall but nothing like June and July of '08.

Today I ran across this article, which states:

Security company Trend Micro, has recently warned that Internet community in Bahrain is at high threat from the rising cybercrime. The security firm has sterilized over a million infected PCs throughout the Middle East during Q1 2009, out of which, 159,228 were located in Bahrain...

Security researchers believe that high Internet use in Bahrain is the prime reason behind the increase in the nation's cybercrime. As far as the figures by Trend Micro are concerned, Internet usage in the country has increased 525%, which indicates that currently 34.8% Bahrainis are susceptible to cybercrime.

Fancy that.