An Online report on cybercrime especially on mobile devices and internet networks showed that hacking reached an all time high last year with experts expressing concern on the steady rise of the crimes to organizations across Africa and other continents.
Latest report by Check Point Research based on collaborative research and in-depth analysis of over 300,000 hours of monitored network traffic, from more than 16,000 threat prevention gateways and one million Smartphones revealed the degree of infiltration and sophistication of new threats in enterprises.
Mobility, virtualization and other technologies have changed the way people do business. While organisations have adopted technological tools to enhance productivity, they often forget about the security implications that arise when they lack the proper security implementations.
The Check Point 2015 Security Report revealed the prevalence and growth of threats on enterprise networks, through information obtained over the course of 2014. Some of the key findings include the fact that Known and Unknown Malware has Increased Exponentially.
According to the report, “106 unknown malware hit an organisation every hour: 48 times more than the 2.2 downloads per hour reported in 2013.Unknown malware will continue to threaten the enterprise in the future. Even worse than unknown malware is zero-day malware, which is effectively built from scratch to exploit software vulnerabilities of which vendors aren’t yet even aware. Cybercriminals are also continuing to use bots to amplify and accelerate the spread of malware. 83 percent of organizations studied were infected with bots in 2014, allowing constant communication and data sharing between these bots and their command and control servers”.
It was also revealed that mobile devices are a company’s biggest vulnerability as they provide easier direct access to valuable organisational assets than any other intrusion point. “For an organisation with more than 2,000 devices on its network, there is a 50 per cent chance that there are at least 6 infected or targeted mobile devices on their network. 72 percent of IT providers agreed that their top mobile security challenge is securing corporate information, and 67 percent said their second biggest challenge is managing personal devices storing both corporate and personal data”.
Corporations frequently rely on applications to help their business be more organized and streamlined. However, these applications become vulnerable points of entry for businesses. Some applications, such as file sharing, are obviously risky. The rise of ‘shadow IT’, applications that aren’t sponsored or supported by the central IT organization has led to even riskier business. Research revealed that 96 percent of organisations studied used at least one high-risk application in 2014, a 10 point increase from the previous year. Check Point research also unveiled that 12.7 high-risk application events happen every hour. That creates many opportunities for cybercriminals to access the corporate network.
Cybercriminals are not the only threat to the integrity and security of corporate data. Just as quickly as a hacker could penetrate a network, in-network actions can also easily result in data loss. Check Point found that 81 percent of the organisations analyzed suffered a data loss incident, up 41 percent from 2013. Data can unknowingly leak out of any organization for a variety of reasons, most of those tied to current and past employee actions. While most security strategies focus on protecting data from hackers coming in, it is equally important to protect data from the inside out.
JUMOKE AKIYODE
