Enterprises in Australia Targeted Excessively For Ransomware Attacks

Symantec reveals in its annual report that Australian business houses suffered excessively high rate of attacks from ransomware during 2014 in comparison to other nations.

20th annual Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) of Symantec revealed that Australia was placed 7th for ransomware attacks in the world and ranked first in the APJ or (Asia Pacific and Japan) region. In general, ransomware attacks swelled 113% but the vendor thinks that this number would be “slightly higher” when talking of Australia.

Itwire.com published news on 14th April, 2015 quoting a statement of Nick Savvides, Symantec Security Specialist, as “It is disturbing to think about being 7th for ransomware globally. I believe it is fact that the criminals head in the direction of money and Australia being a fairly rich country, there are many opportunities for the criminals to extract money from this country.”

Attacks in Australia were traced to China, India and the United States which is familiar to 2013.

The report highlights that Australia also had 21% of crypto-ransomware among all ransomware infections.

Moreover, Australia ranked second most targeted behind India when it came to social media scams in the Asia-Pacific region.

ZDNet.com published news on 14th April, 2015 quoting Savvides as saying “there was such widespread scamming in Australia because users click and share scams when the material was posted by a trusted person in a social media network.”

Savvides said that a similar pattern is happening within enterprise also which is known as Supply chain attack. The growth of supply chain attacks during 2014 partly contributed to the 40% rise in global attacks on companies resulting in five out of six targeted companies.

He explained that attackers are looking for less-protected companies in their supply chain to compromise like supplies of software because many companies are starting to strengthen their security.

Symantec has requested consumers to take more care on social media by saying: “Don’t click links enclosed in unsolicited email or social media messages especially from unknown sources. Scammers know people are more intended to click on links coming from their friends and hence, attackers compromise accounts to send malicious links to the contacts of the account owner.”

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