Not totally safe with antivirus software

KUALA LUMPUR: If you think your computer and its data are completely safe with periodically updated antivirus software, you are wrong, a computer virus expert said.

Symantec Hosted Services Group (Asia-Pacific and Japan) vice-president Bjorn Engelhardt said this is because there are millions of viruses and other malicious software (malware) that are being mass produced and put on the Internet regularly.

He said this makes it virtually impossible for any antivirus program to detect and prevent each an every malware from attacking your computer and its data.

“This is why you need to monitor the traffic on the Internet. Using this method you would be able to detect any unusual traffic and take immediate action if you find something out of the ordinary.

“The antivirus software works for known viruses. What we are worried about is malware that is new and these are created in the millions everyday,” Engelhardt said.

For example, he said, if someone sends you an e-mail with a webpage address, that is unknown to you, and you click on it, you could be in trouble.

“Although your computer does not crash the minute you open the webpage, the malware would plant itself on your computer, copy all the data, and send it back to the person who planted the malware,” he said in an interview here with the Bernama news agency recently.

New trend

According to Engelhardt, computers crashing due to viruses seems to be “out of trend” and the trend now is to plant malware by spamming through mass e-mail messages and “stealing” users’ personal information for illegal ventures.

The Asean and China markets are presently a prime target for such an activity. He said Symantec’s analysis report revealed that there was a surge in spam levels last month to 89.4%, an increase of 5.5% per cent since January.

While spam volumes grew in February, the size of spam messages simultaneously shrank, as did the number of spam e-mail messages containing attachments.

Over the past year, the number of attachments diminished from 10% in April last year to less than 1% last month, while the average file size of spam e-mail fell from 5Kb in October 2009 to 3.3Kb last month.

Rather than attaching images to e-mail messages directly, spammers now choose to host the image online through a free image-hosting service, thus reducing the average file size of a spam e-mail message, Engelhardt said.

Lackadaisical

Meanwhile, Paul Woo, principal consultant at Symantec, told In.Tech that 50 Malaysian companies in the banking, telecommunications and manufacturing sectors, suffered cyberattacks in the past 12 months.

He could not put a ringgit value to the damage suffered by those companies, if any, but Symantec estimates that Asia Pacific businesses lost a total of US$763,000 (RM2.59mil) to cyberattacks last year.

“There is still the perception (among businesses) that an antivirus program provides enough protection. Antivirus solutions are not a silver bullet,” Woo said.

Aside from religiously updating the antivirus program with the latest patches, businesses have to also guard against data leakage via lost laptops, smartphones or other portable devices, as well as social-engineering or phishing attacks on employees.

Such attacks involve tricking an employee into revealing a password or other sensitive information that can be misused by the hacker.