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An exponential rise in malware attacks was noticed which showed that employees are now at more risk of accidentally putting malware on their employers’ enterprise networks. A new report now shows that such accidents have been happening at least once every four seconds, meaning the number of flaws are high.
Security researchers at security firm, Check Point, said that they had analyzed information they got for over 30,000 incidents that had been gotten by their prevention software, ThreatCloud. The software is currently working at more than a thousand companies globally at the moment.
In their research, the researchers found out that employees at different firms were taking a rather lackadaisical attitude towards the cyber security of the companies they worked for and because of that, they unwillingly downloaded harmful software to the computer networks they used at work.
The malware they download on their systems is unknown malware, malware that has not been identified by security researchers yet. According to the data given in the report, the employees downloaded the data onto the networks every four seconds. According to the report there are about 971 malware downloads every hour. The stats also showed that the number of malware downloads had increased nine fold from the last year’s figure. In 2015, the number of malware downloads per hour were 106.
Most of the times, malware authors only make slight changes to the malware to make it invisible to the security researchers. However, even malware which have some recognizable signatures is also being downloaded on the enterprise networks.
But that begs the question of why companies do not block the technology if they know its bad. The most obvious reason is that most organizations have not been keeping up to date with their security systems. This means that they are leaving themselves vulnerable to malware that normally is not even supposed to affect them.
Constant use of mobile devices is also another factor that has led to the rise in the infection of networks by malware. Mobile devices which might be connected to the company Wifi can also be used as another attack vector that the scrupulous actors cab user to enter into the network system. Securing such spaces has also been a work in progress for the enterprise sector. However, the report also indicated that typically employees did not want to be constantly followed which meant that security came in as a secondary thing for the organizations.
After all is said and done, organizations are required to keep their network systems safe and they should take responsibility.
