Online security awareness seen to grow after hacking

By Riza Lozada

The recent cyber heist involving $81 million stolen from the Bangladesh central bank by suspected Chinese hackers and which was coursed through the country for laundering is expected to heighten awareness of firms on the need for security in online transactions, cyber security solutions provider Fortinet said. Fortinet said it is offering to provide with security systems the country’s biggest banks that the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) categorizes as “too big to fail.” 

Derek Manky, Global Security Strategist of Fortinet, said the Interpol has been closely working with the world’s top cyber security experts, including Fortinet, to address the vulnerabilities of financial and banking sectors that have been described by Manky as “disproportionately targeted with 44.6 percent of all malicious activity” by hackers.Manky said the “loot” in global cybercrimes is estimated at trillions of dollars yearly, compared to only $30 billion spent annually for combating the attackers.

“Due to the lucrative financial data obtained when these networks are successfully infiltrated, banking and finance organizations are disproportionately targeted with 44.6 percent of all malicious activity. Hackers rely on high-velocity attacks and target financial institutions with sophisticated ‘trojans’ and land-and-expand attack strategies to infiltrate and persist within the network,” a Fortinet report indicated.

Fortinet said it is deploying a Cyber Threat Assessment Program (CTAP) designed to provide organizations a detailed look into the type and amount of cyber threats posing risks to their networks, yet are going undetected by their existing security solutions.

Through the process, the FortiGate high-performance firewall will be installed within a customer’s network, where it monitors traffic in the network for intrusions, malware and malicious applications. This new offering is part of a broader effort by Fortinet and its FortiGuard Labs threat-research team to integrate risk and advisory capabilities with its end-to-end security platform to provide customers greater insight into cyber risks that swiftly change.

“There’s an overall increase of almost 400 percent from the first quarter of last year when compared with this years Top 10. The key contributors to this growth are the WM and Android malware, both of which have since exploded by as much as 4 digit percentage points,” Fortinet said. “The Philippines is not alone in the high WM malware activity. The US, Japan and Germany represent the Top 3 countries for this particular variant.

This word macros technique was also employed by the recent Locky ransomware and without recent updated backups, victims have little or no options for recovery,” Fortinet reported. The solution is to block it before it encrypts data and Fortinet blocks Locky’s C2 communication and stops it from wreaking havoc.

The Philippines is also identified as among the top target countries for Triada, currently the top mobile malware that seeks to redirect the money used in in-app purchases to the threat actors. Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and the United States are target countries for Triada malware, according to Fortinet. Social media and multimedia streaming activities account for 25.65 percent of all network traffic, exposing corporate systems and sensitive data to risks of infection from drive-by downloads, social engineering and malvertising.

Facebook is the most dominant social media site representing 47.27 percent of all social-media traffic, with YouTube contributing to 42.29 percent of streamed content. Application control appears to be a continual challenge for administrators.

A significant amount of peer-to-peer traffic, primarily Bittorrent and gaming activity, opens the network to malicious content that piggybacks on top of applications and files downloaded through these popular sites. Enterprises should exercise caution when building application control policies on their networks, according to Fortinet.