Kaspersky eyes improved growth through sharper focus on corporate customers
Following 15-per-cent growth last year, software security firm Kaspersky Lab aims to expand by 20 per cent this year by increasing its focus on corporate customers.
Jimmy Fong, channel sales director for Southeast Asia, yesterday said the Russia-based company’s target was to have 60 per cent of its revenue generated by the corporate segment.
Kaspersky Lab offers licence keys through its resellers for corporate customers, for which it provides both products and services.
“We started to change and focus on corporates last year. This is a huge market that requires a lot more in terms of services. The demands for security for the business sector are much higher than for consumers, in terms of continuity and scalability, since businesses cannot stop,” said Fong.
The government sector, financial and insurance firms, and manufacturing are the top three industries in Kaspersky’s corporate focus.
It is essential for corporates to protect their devices, from laptops and PCs through to tablets and smart phones, while consumers also require protection when using apps, said Fong.
Vicente Diaz, principle security analyst at the company’s Global Research and Analysis Team, said that laptops and mobiles were the devices at the highest security risk, with Windows the most-attacked operating system on the PC platform, and Android the most targeted by mobile malware.
Kaspersky Lab currently processes 315,000 unique malware samples every day, while in Thailand, malware attacks have affected an estimated 42.3 per cent of Internet users.
Thailand hosted 119,213 incidents in the first quarter of this year, ranking it 42nd worldwide for such attacks.
The top malware detections are trojan, worm, virus, HackTool, backdoor and exploit, according to the company.
Kaspersky Lab has also recorded a rare example of one cyber-criminal attacking another.
Last year, Hellsing, a small and technically unremarkable cyber-espionage group targeting mostly government and diplomatic organisations in Asia, was subjected to a spear-phishing attack by another threat actor and decided to strike back.
Kaspersky Lab believes that this could mark the emergence of a new trend in criminal cyber-activity, dubbed “APT wars”.
The discovery was made by Kaspersky Lab experts during research into the activity of Naikon, a cyber-espionage group also targeting organisations in the Asia-Pacific.
The experts noticed that one of Naikon’s targets had spotted the attempt to infect its systems with a spear-phishing e-mail carrying a malicious attachment.
To protect against Hellsing-type attacks, Kaspersky Lab urges users not to open suspicious attachments from people they do not know, and to beware of password-protected archives.
Kaspersky Lab products successfully detect and block the malware used by both the Hellsing and Naikon, the company said.
