Singapore has become a hotspot for business email scams and malicious web addresses, according to cyber-security firm Trend Micro.

The island has been used as an ideal base for the fraudulent activities, in which scammers typically target a company’s staff member with the authority to make payments – usually a chief executive or similar. Around 27.3 per cent of Southeast Asian email compromise frauds detected by the firm occurred in Singapore, closely followed by operations in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Singapore is also host to the vast majority of malicious URLs in the region, accounting for 68.1 per cent of cases blocked by Trend Micro. It counts as the second highest for detected malware attacks after Malaysia and the third for receiving the most email threats after Vietnam and Indonesia.

“Enterprises need to strengthen their cyber defences at every touchpoint, namely, on the endpoint, in the cloud and at the network layer,” said Trend Micro’s VP of SEA and India Nilesh Jain.

The firm noted that business email scams increased 28 per cent worldwide last year, yielding an average of around $177,000 per incident.