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The number of virtual attacks has been growing quickly over the past 3 years. According to Symantec’s (2016) report, the total number of zero day vulnerabilities increased more than 125% compared to the 2014 and 2015 periods. By 2014, 24 of these vulnerabilities were discovered and last year approximately 54.
This type of vulnerability is most often discovered and exploited by malicious users in a massive way, thus causing significant impacts in environments not prepared to face this kind of attack.
The same report presents other very scary numbers, with 3/4 of the websites on the Internet having some kind of vulnerability that could put at risk all those who use their services.
Many companies are afraid to expose that they have suffered attacks for a variety of reasons. The number of unreported incidents has increased by more than 85% between 2014 and 2015, reaching about US $ 500 million in lost or stolen incidents, according to the Internet Security Threat Report.
A well-known attack, which encrypts the data and asks for ransom, known as ransomware(with several variants), grew 35% globally, analyzing the same periods of 2014 and 2015. The number of supported and affected platforms that draws attention, now also for smartphones, Mac and Linux operating systems.
Although the numbers are scary, they are to some extent understood by the amount of services and products that migrated their platform to the internet, and because of that, also influencing the environment for committing fraud. Network protectionis no longer a competitive advantage for a business, regardless of size, but rather a necessity.
Network protection is not exclusive to medium and large companies.
Security is not necessarily expensive, there are solutions for every type of investment and business maturity (see – How to approve a budget for purchasing security solutions). The important thing is to have basic security mechanisms, such as UTM Firewall, usually comprised of Firewall,Web proxy, VPNand other resources focused on protecting your business, clients, suppliers, employees as well as other interested parties.
It is worth remembering that small companies, or the ones with little maturity in technology, are also targets of virtual attacks. The opportunistic attacks do not see the size or the segment of the company, but rather the degree of vulnerability presented by the corporate structure. Therefore, it is more common for a smaller company to have such vulnerabilities than big business, so the chances of successful attacks on these types of customers are greater.
It is easier to circumvent the security mechanisms of smaller companies, and from them to seek escalation of privileges and access to other environments in which it maintains some kind of online relationship. Therefore, regardless of the business size, network protectionis fundamental.
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