Stop phishing

SME IT

SME are more vulnerable to virus attacks

There's a virus lurking in every SME closet if a Sophos survey -- which says 42 per cent of SMEs update their anti-virus software only once a week -- is anything to go by. What's scary is that the latest email and internet-aware viruses often spread around the globe within a matter of minutes.

Targeted attacks by criminals online is a reality at highest-ever levels, says managed Unified Threat Management (UTM) services company, Network Box -- and SMEs are the most vulnerable to them since they have the lowest levels of protection in place.

Moreover, viruses are being replaced with a much more sinister threat -- cybercriminals. These comprise worms, trojans and spyware which now make up to 70 per cent of all malware that target the most vulnerable sectors of PCs users: smaller businesses (read SMEs) and home users who do not have sophisticated anti-virus packages.

In fact, research by Network Box indicates that 63 per cent of SMEs have no protection against phishing attacks, 69 per cent don't filter web content to protect themselves from employees downloading harmful content and 50 per cent have no protection against spyware.

Meanwhile, botnets too have come into their own in the first half of 2006 with botnet 'masters' continuing to hone and improve techniques to enslave business PCs to run software, allowing a system to be controlled without the knowledge of its user. The increase in botnets has led to a marked increase in both the number and sophistication of phishing attacks, which have developed to include 'spear phishing' -- a targeted email against an individual that appears to come from a trusted source, eg. from within a company.

By neglecting to update anti-virus protection regularly, SMEs continue to put their networks and critical data at risk. Only a small percentage of SMEs have implemented anti-virus gateway protection (to combat viruses and worms which spread via email). Mass-mailing viruses dominate the infections reported to virus companies.

Several tools are available to help SMEs manage their anti-virus software. Automated systems can be scheduled to check for updates from a dedicated server on an hourly basis and even laptop and remote home workers can be provided with the latest virus protection.

The bare minimum an SME should consider is a firewall and a desktop and server anti-virus, an anti-spam and an email content-filtering solution, and a virtual private network (VPN) for remote users. UTM devices are gaining favour with SMEs too. There are several solutions on the market that are particularly suitable for SMEs which combine a number of the key IT security products -- firewall, anti-virus, intrusion detection, anti-spam, content filtering -- on a single appliance.

IDC forecasts that UTM security appliances will constitute 50 per cent of western European security appliance revenues for vendors by 2009, growing at 61 per cent compound annual growth rate. India falls way behind. When choosing an anti-virus package, look out for decent support for the product. If you are not up-to-date and you do get infected then you are going to have problems. You can either choose McAfee, Symantec (Norton) or Trend Micro. Many anti-virus packages include some sort of firewall functionality as the line between virus infection and hacker attack gets blurred.

Incidentally, online scanning -- where a user logs into a website which runs a scan of the PC -- may look appealing and cheap but should generally be avoided as it has inherent risks. What the websites do is to insert a client locally that runs on your local machine but you have to open up communication to let the client run and that could be potentially abused.

The writer is in-charge of 'ICE World' at Business Standard