Cape Town - Nearly half of firms globally are not prepared for cyber threats on their networks, research has shown.
Research
conducted by B2B International in conjunction with security company
Kaspersky Lab showed that while firms recognize the threat from cyber
crime, over 40% are not actively engaged in protecting themselves from
an attack.
"According to the survey, in 41% of cases the answer
is 'no' - corporate infrastructure lacks the necessary protection to
handle online attacks," Kaspersky Lab said.
Corporate attacks are
becoming more dangerous, particularly where there are real world
targets such as the Iranian nuclear facilities attacked by the Stuxnet
worm and the follow-up Flame malware that had specific targets.
The firm also identified additional malware linked to the Flame virus and that development of the code went as far back as 2006.
Awareness
Kaspersky
said the latest analysis shows that "at least three other Flame-related
malicious programs were created" but added that "their nature is
currently unknown".
According to the survey, employees are not sufficiently aware of the risks of malware.
"Only 27% of business
representatives had heard about the first example of the modern cyber
weapon - Stuxnet; fewer still knew about the Trojan Duqu designed for
the targeted collection of confidential information (13%)," said
Kaspersky.
Civil servants in Taiwan were put through a mandatory internet security course after failing a company test on spam.
Nearly
one sixth, or 1 000, of the New Taipei City employees opened an e-mail
purporting to contain a sex video of a local celebrity.
Cyber criminals often use methods that rely on human behaviour to gain entry to otherwise secure systems.
"They
send mail to executives, HR [human resources] guys, financial guys who
are less technical with some interesting PDF file or Excel file, trying
to give you some interesting information.
"Non-very-technical
people open it and infect their computers and then it propagates inside
the network," Sergey Novikov, head of Kaspersky Lab Global Research and
Analysis Team told News24.
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