Businesses change and grow every day – as do the environments in which they operate, the constraints on their budgets and the threats they face. This is particularly true when it comes to cyber crime, which has the potential to be one of the most costly line items on a business’s balance sheet if it’s not properly addressed.
The most common cyber threats in South Africa are related to financially motivated cyber crime, such as crypto mining carried out by self-spreading malware, or by coin-miner modules dropped by malware. Those sound complex and like they belong in a different world to South Africa, but the digital world is global and pays no attention to man-made borders.
Along with ‘living off the land binaries’ that lurk in the background harvesting data, these cyber attacks mostly land up in a network or system when a user downloads a ‘cracked’ version of legitimate software, or they download something that looks like the software they intend, but it’s cleverly disguised malware.
Carlo Bolzonello, South Africa country lead for Trellix.
These clever disguises are what make them so lethal in a business context, because many of them look like the tools that system administrators themselves would use. While some types of malware just lurk in the background and possibly harvest personal data such as banking details or corporates’ competitive information, others have a far more instant effect.
For example, we came across a Russian origin disk wiper malware recently that quietly sat in the background, undetected by its host’s cyber security system. Once activated, that malware effectively destroyed everything on its host computer in 15 seconds – including its operating system and all data.
It’s true that new threats emerge every day, and many Sout ..
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