THREAT DETECTION

ACCORDING to Trend Micro, a security software and solutions company, Asean companies take 184 days to detect a data breach, far behind the global average standard of 99 days.

The company’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa Vice President Dhanya Thakkar says in that period, organisations are looking at a US$4 million average cost in data breach and the longer it takes to detect, the more expensive it becomes in terms of impact.

“While having a preventive measure is important, detection technology is as important. This is where lots of organisations are lacking. Malaysian companies need to do more in terms of making sure they are equipped with both prevention and detection.

"We can’t protect everything but we should be able to detect everything in a short time, that would be the goal,” says Thakkar, adding that quicker detection will also contain the loss a company has to bear.

RISING THREATS

In terms of the biggest threats in the cyber world, business email compromise and data breaches due to flaws in the system are still the main concern for Malaysia.

However, Thakkar says the nation has also done a lot in the past several years to limit the gap.

“Ransomware was a big thing last year, but it’s now growing at about three per cent year on year, which is a good improvement. Malaysia has certainly placed new measures to combat cyber threats,” he says.

He adds that while some things are changing, cryptocurrency mining, on the other hand, is on the rise globally.

“At Trend Micro, we have seen a tremendous increase in terms of cryptocurrency mining detection and we believe it will continue to grow especially this year, as it is an easier bay for cybercriminals.

“If you look at cryptocurrency, to mine that ‘coin’ would need very heavy processing power and graphics card but if they compromise end users and steal their computing power to mine the digital currency means they are not using their own processing power.

“They would be using your computer for the mining process and you might not even know about it. What you’ll experience is just a slow down in terms of computing performance,” says Thakkar.

STATISTICS

Besides digital mining and ransomware, malicious URLs continue to ensnare users in Malaysia.

According to a Trend Micro’s mid-year roundup report, these malicious URLs were being accessed more than 241 million times in Asia, accounting for approximately 57.9 per cent of all malicious links accessed globally.

Among all Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia generated 18.5 per cent of the clicks on these links or five million clicks, ranking third in the region.

An overwhelming 75.9 per cent of macro malware attacks were found in Asia. Macro malware takes advantage of the programming language for Microsoft Office to spread viruses.

Out of 293,000 macro malware attacks detected globally, 222,000 originated from Asia. Malaysia saw 579 events in the first half of this year, accounting for 11.2 per cent of such attacks in the Southeast Asian region.

MOVING FORWARD

Malaysia still has a long way to be ready for the

Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0), especially in terms of cybersecurity.

Thakkar says the country spends 0.08 per cent of its gross domestic product on cybersecurity purposes which is not much compared with other countries that have executed IR4.0.

In light of the increasing cyber attacks and cybercriminal tactics becoming more sophisticated, it’s high time that organisations take cybersecurity a lot more seriously in order to harness the full potential of digital transformation.

Thakkar hopes that Malaysia’s cybersecurity laws will make it mandatory for organisations to disclose any data breach so that the issue of vulnerability will come to light. -