FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Kaspersky Lab eyes double-digit Thai  revenue growth, mulls local branch office

Kaspersky Lab eyes double-digit Thai   revenue growth, mulls local branch office

Global Internet security company Kaspersky Lab, which expects to achieve double-digit revenue growth in the Thai market this year, is considering setting up a branch office in the country.


Yeo Siang, general manager at Kaspersky Lab South East Asia, on Tuesday said that Thailand represented a high-potential growth market for the Russia-headquartered business. 

Enterprise, business and end customers have concerns about online security protection and the company has security solutions and services to support all segments of the market, he said.

The main target markets in the Kingdom are business-to-business (B2B) including banking, government, telecoms, medical and large enterprises.

The firm also offers enterprise solution services and security solutions to support Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cyber-security. 

Kaspersky Lab is considering establishing a branch office in Thailand, and also has plans to join hands with a Thai university to provide security courses for students in order to transfer knowledge and know-how to leverage security skills to the younger generation, he explained.

Meanwhile, Benjamas Chuthapiphat, territory channel manager, Thailand, at Kaspersky Lab, said that the company offered security packages, solutions and services such as anti-virus for mobile, Android devices, Endpoint Detection and Response, as well as total security solutions to support business-to-customer (B2C) clients, B2B customers and large enterprises.

Kaspersky Lab distributes its security products and services in Thailand via more than 100 resellers and three distributors: Tech Titan, Icom Tech, and VST ECS (Thailand).

She added that Kaspersky’s Thai business this year is expected to generate revenue growth of around double digits, divided into B2B at around 60 per cent and 40 per cent from B2C. 

Factors driving market growth come from the awareness of business to concerns about cyber-security, the Thailand 4.0 scheme, smart city projects, users’ concerns, as well as awareness over online security and cyber-threats in banking, and how to protect businesses and their customers, Benjamas said.

 

Rising threat level

Kaspersky Lab has also released in its “Kaspersky Security Bulletin for 2018”, which contains local statistics and an overview of threats for Thailand for the past year. 

According to the report, the Web remains one of the major sources of cyber-threats in the country, with the company detecting 30.2 million Internet-borne infections last year.

Overall, 31.8 per cent of Thai users were attacked by Web-borne threats in 2018, according to the report, which comprises data from Kaspersky Security Network. 

This marks a significant increase in comparison with 2017, when Kaspersky Lab products detected only 12.7 million threats, with 29 per cent of users attacked.

According to Suguru Ishimaru, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab Japan, the increase in the number of online threats in Thailand follows a global trend, with the overall growth of detected malicious installation packages and new mobile-banking Trojans.

Several Southeast Asian countries also made it into the world’s top 10 nations with the highest percentage of users attacked by online threats – for example, by banking Trojans such as DanaBot, which was detected in the second quarter of 2018 and continues to develop rapidly.

“Currently Thailand is 73rd worldwide in terms of the dangers we have detected which are associated with Web surfing. While we can easily say that Thailand is safer compared with its neighbours in the region, we still highly urge Internet users in the country to put their guard up against these costly and damaging online threats,” said Siang. 

“The more than 30 million online infections blocked last year proved that Thailand is still within the radar of cyber-criminals. Beef up your defences and improve your online habits. Do not be a willing prey,” he added.

Attacks via browsers are the primary method for spreading malicious programs. 

Most often, cyber-criminals penetrate systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in browsers and their plugins (drive-by download), he GM added. 

Infection due to this type of attack takes place when visiting an infected website, without any intervention from the user and without their knowledge.

This method is used in the majority of attacks. Among them, file-less malware is the most dangerous, as its malicious code uses registry or WMI subscriptions for persistence, leaving no single object for static analysis on the disk, Siang said.

Kaspersky Lab products that were developed to fight such stealthy threats apply a Behavior Detection component, which benefits from ML (machine learning)-based models and behaviour heuristics to detect malicious activity even if the code is unknown, he added.

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