Malwarebytes has revealed the extent of cyber threats facing businesses in the UK. Ransomware, botnets, adware and spyware incidents increased significantly over the course of a year, and the UK had the second highest number of malware detections across Europe.
To better understand the cyber threats facing UK businesses Malwarebytes compared data taken from business endpoints running Malwarebytes in Europe in the first quarter of 2016 and the same period of 2017. The analysis revealed that malware incidents faced by UK businesses increased 500 per cent year over year, with no single threat type declining. Across Europe, Italy and UK were almost tied as the countries with the highest number of malware detections in Europe (16.3 per cent and 16.2 per cent respectively) in the first quarter of 2017 and, in total, account for almost a third of total incidents in Europe.
“The threat landscape is changing every second with new malware variants arising every day,” said Marcin Kleczynski, Malwarebytes CEO. “As security professionals, it is our responsibility to protect businesses from these threats, but most competitive offerings take a singular approach to the problem that cannot keep up with how fast malware is evolving. That is why we are now equipping businesses with seven different layers for stopping and remediating today’s and tomorrow’s threats.”
Additional findings show that, while ransomware dropped slightly across Europe (four per cent) from quarter to quarter, UK businesses saw a 57 per cent increase in the threat. In fact, UK is hit by more ransomware than any other European country and there were 3X as many detections in the country in Q1 2017 than the next most impacted country – France.
To safeguard businesses from escalating and changing threats, Malwarebytes has released a new single-agent cloud platform for business featuring Malwarebytes Incident Response (IR), Malwarebytes Endpoint Protection (EP) and a new cloud-based management console. Features include:
- Malwarebytes Cloud Platform: Malwarebytes’ new cloud platform makes deployment and on-going management of Malwarebytes solutions easy. Administrators benefit from broader visibility into endpoints that exist within their environment at all times. Additionally, the solutions do not require a constant connection to the cloud-platform, meaning users are still protected when they are not connected, meaning users are still protected when they are not connected.
- Malwarebytes Endpoint Protection: Malwarebytes Endpoint Protection features layers of detection technologies on a single unified endpoint agent, including the new Anomaly Detection Engine which utilises machine learning to identify ‘good files’, rather than the traditional approach that attempts to identify known malware samples - a process strongly resembling signature-based approaches to threat detection.
- Malwarebytes Incident Response: Malwarebytes Incident Response is a threat detection and remediation tool built on a highly scalable, cloud-based management platform. Powered by the company’s proprietary Linking Engine, the solution provides the most complete and thorough remediation possible, improves threat detection for businesses of all sizes, and minimises the time it takes to respond to an attack with the added benefits of scalability, flexibility, and automation.
In addition, Malwarebytes is now a validated, next-generation replacement for traditional antivirus (AV) solutions. Coalfire Systems, Inc, a leading provider of IT advisory services for security, certified by the PCI Security Standards Council as a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), conducted an independent assessment of Malwarebytes. The company validated Malwarebytes as exceeding the technical conditions for antivirus software outlined within the requirements of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 3.2, including requirements 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3.
