Malware posing a growing threat to enterprises

The scale of the threat posed by malware operating on enterprise networks grew significantly in 2013, according to the latest annual report from Check Point Software Technologies.

The researchers found malware on 84% of the organisations analysed for the report, with malicious software downloaded at an average rate of one every 10 minutes during the year.

In 2013, 58% of organisations had users downloading malware every two hours - up threefold from just 14% in 2012.

New and unknown malware dominated the threat landscape. Check Point estimates that 33% of organisations downloaded at least one infected file with unknown malware during the last six months of 2013.

According to the report, the emergence of new obfuscation tools called ‘crypters’ are helping malware writers to bypass detection from security software.

Use of high-risk applications on enterprise networks, including P2P file sharing and torrents, also continued to increase. On an average day, these high-risk applications are being used every nine minutes, Check Point said.

Data loss was also a top security priority in 2013, and was not confined to the headline-grabbing breaches at major brands including Target.

The report suggests that 88% of organisations analysed experienced at least one potential data loss event during the year, up from 54% in 2012.

Image courtesy of Intel Free Press under CC