Employees Visit Malicious Websites Every 5 Seconds

We have reported on the biggest vulnerability of most companies being the employee. Now a report comes out published by CheckPoint Software Technologies that shows an employee at an enterprise company accesses a malicious website every 5 seconds.

CheckPoint used data from 1,100 ‘security checkups,' which were connected to 31,000 different security gateways. What this means is that in 2015, malware was downloaded every 81 seconds. In 2014, the average was a malware download every 6 minutes.

What is further revealing is that high-risk applications such a VPNs, BitTorrent, and Anonymizers are used every 4 minutes by enterprise employees. IT personnel in 50% of the study do not restrict this activity.

The report underscored the need for information security training, noting that sensitive data is sent outside of the organization every 32 minutes at the average enterprise organization

Core Security threat researcher Nick Buchholz noted that spam e-mail is “a prime vector for attackers because it takes little effort to craft a payload that can bypass spam filters” and entice victims. Spear phishing attacks continue to be a successful attack vector for malware distribution.

Source: SCMagazine