Fifty-seven per cent of companies do not use any specific tools to control third-party applications used by employees, a report said.

Cybercriminals have plenty of tricks up their sleeves for infecting a system, added the recent survey conducted by IT protection solutions provider Kaspersky Lab in collaboration with B2B International, a top market research company.

Passing malware off as a popular application, for example – so that when an employee tries to run the application, the whole infrastructure is compromised. To prevent such incidents, companies need to develop and enforce security policies specifically addressing the installation and launch of applications; but not all are doing so, the report said.

According to the survey, the majority of companies have no means of controlling applications and 17 per cent of companies have no interest in using new application control technologies or even aren’t aware of them.

It’s a similar story when it comes to connecting external devices and data carriers: only 44 per cent of companies pay enough attention to this issue and deploy device control tools, while 17 per cent of companies aren’t aware of device control tools or have no interest in using them.

Meanwhile, malware distributed through USB carriers represents a continuous threat: in 2012 alone, Kaspersky Lab security solutions prevented more than 3 billion local infection attempts.

Moreover, giving employees total freedom to connect any external device to the corporate network increases the probability of data leakage, the report highlighted. – TradeArabia News Service