Verizon - Hackers Striking Firms with Malware Five Times a Second

V3.co.uk reported on 14th April, 2015 stating that according to "Data Breach Investigations Report' written by US telecom giant Verizon, hackers are targeting businesses with malware-based cyber attacks five times a second.

The company collected data from more than 70 internal and customer networks of contributing partners and revealed the same in its Data Breach Investigations Report.

V3.co.uk reported on 14th April, 2015 quoting Bob Rudis, Managing Principal and author of Verizon's report, as saying "the figure stemmed from data collected from customer networks of security providers which included information from more than 10,000 businesses."

He said: "We had customer logs of five partners and discovered the incident of more than 10,000 organisations with five malware events every second. This is bad but it was really interesting to find the uniqueness of the malware. We found that 70 to 90% samples of malware are actually exclusive with unique signature."

Ruddis added that uniqueness of this malware is not a sign of sophistication but it is only to avoid traditional cyber defenses which are signature-based.

The report reveals that interestingly phishing remains the most usual method of gaining access to classified information for hackers.

Verizon suggested that in three breaches, two happened due to fragile or pilfered passwords prompting for a sturdy two-factor authentication process.

2,122 definite breaches in 61 countries were put under the scanner due to revelation of the report. Numerous of these breaches were found to be started with phishing attacks.

Approximately one in four (23%) of recipients unwrapped phishing emails and over one in 10 (11%) of recipients clicked on attached files. Half (50%) of unbeaten phishing attacks had emails which were opened within one hour of the receipt of the email. According to Verizon, corporate hackers frequently targeted marketing staff, lawyers and human resources in corporate environments with phishing mails because these departments frequently deal huge number of emails.

The report also revealed that companies could take straight-forward steps to defend themselves against well-designed phishing emails trying to trick people to open them and its attachments.

The report says that teaching staff to identify bogus messages could reduce the proportion of victims to send emails from one in four to one in twenty.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/17/2015