OPSWAT Survey Finds Malware Breaches in Companies Commonplace
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) December 18, 2014 -- OPSWAT, provider of solutions to secure and manage IT infrastructure, today announced the results of a recent email security survey held in partnership with Red Earth Software, developers of email security solutions for Exchange Server. The survey showed that over half of the respondents experienced malware breaches in the past 18 months, and that phishing emails were able to get past filters and trick employees at half of the companies surveyed.
The survey was completed by 146 IT Administrators at small to medium-sized businesses using Microsoft Exchange Server. Within the last 18 months, fifty-one percent of the respondents had experienced a malware breach, and fifty percent had employees that clicked on phishing links. Fifty-five percent of IT Administrators are ‘not certain’ or ‘not certain at all’ that their employees will not click on phishing links or malicious email attachments.
“With the sheer number of new viruses introduced every day, it is not surprising that 51% of the respondents experienced a malware breach, particularly since 39% only utilized one anti-malware solution,” said Tony Berning, Product Manager for the Metascan product line at OPSWAT. “By using only one or two anti-virus engines, companies are exposing themselves to malware threats, since no anti-virus engine can be accurate 100% of the time.”
Multi Anti-Malware Scanning to Increase Threat Detection
Using multiple anti-virus engines to scan files like email attachments significantly increases the chance that viruses are successfully detected. OPSWAT’s Metascan Online, an online multi-scanner that uses 40+ anti-virus engines, found that only 3 out of 42 engines initially detected the recent ‘FW: Daily report’ email malware outbreak. By the second day, 20 out of 42 engines detected the virus, and by the fourth day, still only 28 out of 42 detected the virus. This lag in detection is common for emerging threats, and using multiple anti-malware engines, means that only one of the engines needs to detect the virus to ensure protection.
Key findings from the survey:
• 51% of companies had malware get past their email filters in the last 18 months
• 50% of companies had employees that clicked on phishing links in the last 18 months
• 55% of respondents are ‘not certain’ or ‘not certain at all’ that their employees will not click on phishing links or malicious email attachments
• 39% of respondents use only one anti-malware engine
• 68% of companies do not use any form of email encryption
OPSWAT
OPSWAT is a San Francisco-based software company that provides solutions to secure and manage IT infrastructure. Founded in 2002, OPSWAT delivers solutions that provide manageability of endpoints and networks, and that help organizations protect against zero day attacks by using multiple antivirus engine scanning and document sanitization. OPSWAT’s intuitive applications and comprehensive development kits are deployed by SMB, enterprise and OEM customers to more than 100 million endpoints worldwide.
To learn more about OPSWAT’s innovative and unique solutions, please visit http://www.opswat.com.
Elisse Lockhart, OPSWAT, http://www.opswat.com, +1 (415) 590-7300 Ext: 347, [email protected]
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