A Kaspersky report has shown that 29.3% of the 7,962 attacks recorded in Kenya were targeted at corporate users in the first half of 2021.
Organizations in Kenya have become easy targets to financial crimes as more employees work outside the relative safety of the corporate network. The normalization of a distributed workforce makes ensuring the protection of the personal endpoint devices of people, who need to access back-end systems to continue performing their job functions, much more critical.
In addition to securing these devices, cybersecurity training of employees is a key component to defend against the growing scourge of financial malware that uses phishing techniques to target individual users.
“As local businesses have continued to adjust to remote work scenarios and the rest of the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we have continued to witness cybercriminals using this to their advantage, exploiting the situation however they can,” said Bethwel Opil, Enterprise Sales Manager at Kaspersky in Africa.
Kaspersky recommends a few practices that can be employed including having employees only install applications from reliable sources, such as official app stores. However, users must always examine the permissions the application requests. If these permissions do not match the intended function of the program, then it must be questioned and brought to the attention of the IT administrator.
Companies and consumers must also install trusted security solutions such as Kaspersky Security Cloud on all devices connecting to the Internet, to help safeguard against a range of financial cyber threats.
Beyond the fundamental cybersecurity solutions and training, companies must also consider using the likes of Anti-advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) technologies. This will help to strength the defensive posture of their network environment.
“With the landscape unlikely to change for the foreseeable future, it is best to combine sophisticated cybersecurity solutions with continuously evolving training to keep employees appraised of the latest threats especially when it comes to financial malware,” concludes Opil.