Kaspersky's Global IT Risk Report Indicates Decrease in Phishing Attacks

Kaspersky's Global IT Risk Report Indicates 4% Decrease in Phishing Attacks intrusion or hacking, and 9% fewer reported the theft of mobile devices by an external party. In fact, apart from only a few instances where perceived attacks have remained unchanged or increased by one or two per cent, attacks have decreased around the world. In China and Western Europe the theft of mobile devices by an external party dropped by as much as 12%. In North America, a perceived fall of 10% in malware and other malicious programs was the second highest in the world after China with 13%. The fall in mobile thefts may be due to better encryption being implemented on mobile devices in the past year. The reason for the perceived decline in malware is most likely down to businesses simply not realizing that a data loss event has occurred – a result of the ever more complex and stealthy techniques being implemented by cybercriminals. Even so, 54% still say that they are much more concerned about the security of mobile devices than they were a year ago. Now, let’s turn our attention to internal threats. 21% of organizations have lost sensitive data from internal threats in the past year. And 73% have had an internal security incident in 2015. The top threats came from software vulnerabilities and accidental actions by staff, including mistakenly leaking or sharing data. Is this phenomenon a one-time anomaly or the start of a longer term trend? Send your comments to the Cloud and Cyber Security Center. To read the full report visit the Kaspersky Labs' web site.