Symantec: SMBs Super Scared Of Spike In State Sponsored Strikes

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are fretting about the heightened potential of state sponsored hacks battering their infrastructure, Symantec told TechWeekEurope today, as it launched its latest Threat Report.

The security giant found companies with less than 250 employees were now the target of 31 percent of all attacks – a threefold increase from 2011. SMBs are now a big target for nation states too, as military groups with plenty of power and funding attempt to compromise smaller businesses to hit partners further up the supply chain.

SMBs become watering holes

One clever way of doing this is to breach an SMB’s website and lace it with malicious code, in the knowledge that other government sources visit that site regularly. When they visit, exploits are initiated and the government target potentially becomes a victim. This technique is known as a watering hole attack.

“If [targets] are visiting the website of a supplier to make orders, if that website has been compromised, then it makes it much harder to guard against,” Paul Wood, Symantec senior analyst, told TechWeekEurope.

“SMBs don’t have the same security budget as large enterprises, and don’t have the same degree of defence in depth, so they’re a much more attractive target for the bad guys to use them as a springboard into a larger organisation.”

As previous Symantec research had uncovered, the Elderwood Gang, which infamously hit Google in the Aurora attacks of 2009 and 2010, used watering hole attacks to infect 500 organisations in a single day. Its primary targets were defence bodies and it used those lower down the supply chain to hit those further up.

Mobile still threatening

Mobile threats are getting ever-more disconcerting too, Symantec claimed. With Android malware’s trajectory still very much heading skywards, it remains the number one target for hackers, even though iOS has had far more reported vulnerabilities.

Symantec found mobile malware increased by 58 percent in 2012, but only one threat targeted Apple’s operating system. That’s compared to the 103 unique kinds of Android malware picked up by the security firm.

Separately, a report from NQ Mobile claimed mobile infections jumped 200 percent in 2012. It estimated  32.8 million Android devices were infected in 2012, compared to 10.8 million in 2011.

Wood agreed with many who say iOS’ locked down model makes for a far safer environment than Android’s open, fragmented approach. “[Google] has a broader platform to support in terms of hardware, whereas Apple is fairly locked in so it can make changes quickly if it wants to roll out a fix… Google is a lot slower in terms of deploying those patches.”

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