Even as small and medium businesses as well as start-ups in India try to adopt new technologies to stay ahead of the competition, they lag behind when it comes to deploying the necessary security infrastructure to safeguard their assets. Targeted and custom malware attacks are steadily on the rise globally as well as in India, says a new report from IT security firm Kaspersky Lab.

The report highlights that small businesses faced eight times more ransomware attacks in the third quarter of 2016 than the third quarter of 2015.

According to Kaspersky officials, 27,471 attempts to block access to corporate data were detected and repelled by their security solution, called Kaspersky Small Office Security in Q3 2016, compared to 3,224 similar attacks in the same period of 2015. In an earlier report, Kaspersky said the total number of users who encountered ransomware between April 2015 and March 2016 rose by 17.7% compared to the previous 12 months (April 2014-March 2015)—from 1,967,784 to 2,315,931 users around the world.

In Kaspersky Lab’s Corporate IT Security Risks 2016 study, 55% of respondents reported it had taken them several days to restore access to encrypted data after an attack. The term ransomware covers mainly two types of malware: so-called Windows blockers (they block the OS or browser with a pop-up window) and encryption ransomware. The term also includes select groups of Trojan-Downloaders, namely those that tend to download encryption ransomware upon infection of a PC.

“Threats in the small business sector are constantly increasing, so even the smallest companies need to be able to protect themselves,” says Vladimir Zapolyansky, Head of SMB marketing, Kaspersky Lab. “Paying the ransom doesn’t guarantee that data will be returned safely. To ensure protection from ransomware and other types of attacks, businesses need to implement reliable up-to-date information security solutions as a preventive measure—it is always easier to prevent threats, than respond to them when the damage has already been done.”

Source: The Financial Express

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