Enterprises are advised to beef up their information-technology (IT) infrastructure further, as they remain vulnerable to cyber attacks despite the growing awareness and advancement in security features, a Web risk-protection technology expert warned.
Menlo Security Asia-Pacific Managing Director Stephanie Boo encouraged more vigilance among media entities, in particular—whether broadcast, radio, print or online—as well as those in the entertainment and arts, travel, business and retail industries, as they are most vulnerable to cyber attacks. They need to leverage on cyber technologies available to protect their data from threats lurking on the Web.
Media, entertainment and arts, travel and retail industries emerged as among the Top 5 sectors mostly at risk of online attacks, based on the company’s latest report, titled “State of the Web 2016”.
“What we advise most of these enterprises is that you basically take care of both your e-mail and Web,” she told reporters during a media forum at the recent IT Infrastructure Summit 2017 in Makati City as part of Computer Technology International’s (CTI Group) tech road show in the Asian region. “We use them on a day-to-day basis, and they have essentially become our business tools, as well. Unfortunately, 90 percent of our threats nowadays come from both of them.”
Risk-related
In the study—the second edition to date—Menlo Security focused again on the Alexa top 1 million sites. The company also factored in the risks related with the 25 million requests to background sites that a browser makes when visiting all these most-viewed portals. The background sites feed active content to the browser for the purposes of content delivery, trackers, beacons and ad delivery.
By closely examining their main features, including software version, release dates and third-party risk intelligence, among others, the firm was able to discern their impact on the primary sites’ risk. The results showed that 46 percent of the top million web sites are risky, indicating that criminals now have veritable pick of half the Web world to exploit.
Exploitation is also becoming more widespread and effective due to the following reasons: Risky sites have never been easier to exploit; conventional security products fail to provide enough protection; and phishing attacks can now use legitimate portals.
Menlo Security considers a site risky if either the homepage, or the associated background sites, is running vulnerable software, is known bad, or has had a security incident in the last 12 months. Of the 1 million sites studied, 355,804 were either running vulnerable software or accessing background domains running vulnerable software; 166,853 fell into known-bad categories, while 31,938 experienced a recent security incident.
Susceptible
Calculating a category’s risk as the ration of vulnerable portals to total sites, the report indicated that the most susceptible to attacks are the news and media, where 50 percent of sites satisfy at least one of the three criteria. This is followed by entertainment and arts, at 49 percent; and travel, at 42 percent. Completing the Top 5 most risky are business, 41 percent; and shopping, 40 percent.
The impact of threats to them could be seen in several publicly reported high-profile breaches in 2016. These include AOL and the Huffington Post that both served malware. A separate malvertising campaign, on the other hand, struck MSN, Telstra and dating portal PlentyofFish.com.
Meanwhile, Answers.com was victimized by a background site exploit, which could have exposed millions of daily visitors to malware. More so, the New York Times, London Stock Exchange, BBC, Spotify and The Onion are among the notable sites that have been jeopardized in recent years.
“We are seeing more and more of the legit or trusted web sites being compromised,” Boo said, while citing that users should recognize that they are taking a significant risk when connecting directly to the Internet, and a new approach is required to solve this growing concern.
“It is not just external factors that are causing [sites] to be a lot more vulnerable. It is actually internal reasons, as well. An internal reason actually comes in the form of, for example, outdated applications, or not being able to patch your browsers in time. Of course, we all know that anything that is outdated basically has tons of vulnerabilities,” she added.
Lingering local threat
THE World Wide Web is now regarded as a not safe and morally corrupt place. This is because even Third World nations, like the Philippines, are not spared from the illegal activities of criminals on the Internet.
As per-country analysis of Menlo Security’s State of the Web 2016 report, the top 50 most visited sites here are social-network news and media, and streaming media. Of the total, 34 percent, or 17 of them, were serving active code from risky “background sites” marked as malware sites, adult and pornography, cult and occult, questionable or uncategorized. There were even two sites that offer adult contents on the list.
It is also found out in the study that a browser will execute 30 scripts on the average when visiting such 50 portals. These top web sites in the country executed 96 scripts from 35 different background sites. Fourteen percent, or seven of them, executed over 50 scripts, while only two (1 percent) executed one script.
What’s more, eight of the 50 most visited portals (16 percent) were running vulnerable versions of Web software code at the time of testing. The most popular risky version reported with known software vulnerabilities was nginx/1.8.0, and the oldest being Microsoft-iis/7.5, released in 2009.
Such report on the state of the Internet risk is quite alarming for both the public and private sectors.
Big concern
In fact, according to Defenxor President and Director Toto A. Atmojo, who flew from Indonesia to attend the summit and the media briefing, most of the companies he encountered during the event agreed that they are worried about the rampant online threats the business community is facing at present.
“Internet security now becomes a big concern in the Philippines. Their main focus is how to maximize the technology that they have to handle the security of their network,” he said.
While the risk is uncontainable, the level of understanding and response to this has quite improved of late, according to Boo.
“I think without a doubt the awareness, as far as adoption for cyber-security solution, has come into effect due to the Bangaldesh bank compromise,” she said. “So I’m very confident that the Philippines is going to be an explosive market, especially when it comes to cyber-security solution.”
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