Most firms vulnerable to cyberattacks

ARAB NEWS | Published ?Saturday 21 May 2016



JEDDAH: Fifty two percent of companies are likely to face cybertattacks within the next three months, according to a recent study on the telecommunications sector.

The study, conducted by VMware, a company working in cloud infrastructure, discovered that most companies do not have updated cyber defense systems. In addition, 29 percent of decision makers in the information technology sector in the Kingdom believe that one of the biggest weaknesses at their firms is the lack of adequate security development.
The study found that 40 percent of IT decision-makers and more than 60 percent of employees in IT offices in the Kingdom believe that the chief executive officer of the company has to take responsibility for any hacking of public data. A total of 48 percent of decision-makers said that their higher management does not keep up with trends in cyber security.
밫he biggest security weakness at companies is the lack of qualified employees and lack of training, as per the opinions of 50 percent of IT decision-makers,?said Rasheed Al-Omari, strategic expert for business solutions in the Middle East and North Africa at VMware.
The results of the study also highlighted the steps that employees must take to increase their security, showing that 44 percent use their personal equipment to access their company뭩 data, creating considerable risk of hacking for their establishments.
밫here are three well-known ways to hack company and personal accounts, one of which is electronic baiting, or phishing. This is the most common method of stealing data and relies on fraud to convince the user that the forged pages of a given website are real.?
밢nce the user clicks on the page from a fake e-mail link, he or she is led to enter their login information, which is then stolen and used for malicious purposes in the future without the user necessarily knowing,?according to security researcher and expert on cyber crimes, Mohammed Al-Sareehi.
밫he log-on data is also sent back to the hacker through email or SMS,?he added, pointing out that one of the most common forms of hacking occurs when users choose passwords that are easy to guess.