Palo Alto Networks, a leader in enterprise security, unveiled new analysis of malware trends affecting thousands of organisations in major industries throughout the Middle East.  

Saeed Agha, general manager, Middle East, shared that among the findings, which were released as part of the new Unit 42 Threat Landscape Review, was the persistence of the Kuluoz or Asprox malware family, which accounted for a majority of malware attack sessions affecting industries as varied as healthcare, retail and financial services.

The review is a recurring report examining how organisations in different industries are affected by malware.

Research was performed by Unit 42, the Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team, and included data from WildFire, which is a key component of the Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence cloud that helps identify threats from applications by executing them in a virtual environment.

"The trends we observe in the Threat Landscape Review indicate that malware attacks against industries such as finance, healthcare and critical infrastructure occur over similar channels but in significantly different proportions,” said Agha.

“It is essential that information security practitioners, from management to governance to enablement and execution, stay current on trends and malware distribution patterns and take a prevention-centric approach to securing their organisations,” he said.

The key finding in the review revealed that verticals saw e-mail (SMTP) and HTTP as the primary channels for malware delivery, but the percentages for each industry vary significantly, indicating that these industries have different threat profiles.

The retail and wholesale organisations received almost 28 per cent over the web channel, while hospitality organisations received just two percent over the same channel. Organisations need visibility into the types of traffic traversing their networks so they can quickly identify and prevent threats, it added. - TradeArabia News Service