Kaspersky, a global cybersecurity company, on Sunday said that Oman recorded 2,482 financial malware attacks in the first half of 2021 and 37.5 per cent of these attacks targeted corporate users in the sultanate.
'Although Kaspersky’s research shows that the overall number of financial malware attacks in Oman has decreased in the first half of 2021 when compared to the same period of last year, 37.5 per cent of the 2 482 attacks recorded in the country targeted corporate users, which is a cause for concern,' Kaspersky said in a press statement.
Oleg Kupreev, security researcher at Kaspersky, said, “As local businesses have continued to adjust to remote work scenarios and the rest of the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we have continued to witness cyber criminals using this to their advantage, exploiting the situation however they can. When considering such statistics, we believe it is evident that cyber criminals are more commonly targeting unsuspecting corporate users in Oman as a way to compromise corporate systems.”
According to Kaspersky, the organisations in Oman have become susceptible to financial malware as more employees work outside the relative safety of the corporate network. The normalisation of a distributed workforce makes ensuring the protection of the personal endpoint devices of people, who need to access back-end systems to continue performing their job functions, that much more critical.
In addition to securing these devices, cybersecurity training of employees remains a key component to defend against the growing scourge of financial malware that uses phishing techniques to target individual users, Kaspersky said.
Kupreev said, “It is especially financial phishing that has become one of the most popular tools used by cyber criminals to make money. It does not require much investment or technical expertise from a hacker and can be propagated quickly. In most cases, successful scammers win access either to the victim’s money or data that can be sold or otherwise monetised.”
“For any business this points to how important it is to address one of the weakest links in the cybersecurity chain – that of the individual user. It also signifies the importance of remaining vigilant from a cybersecurity perspective, especially during difficult operating conditions,” he added.
© Apex Press and Publishing Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
