Easy target: Rosefelt said that many small and medium businesses do not believe security is a priority.
Local businesses, especially SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in Southeast Asia often find spending on security costly and unnecessary, according NSFocus, an enterprise network security provider.
“Many business owners have the mentality that ‘I have not been hit or hacked, so why spend the money’,” said NSFocus director of web security product management, Guy Rosefelt.
Rosefelt was in town to brief the media on the company’s Threat Intelligence report which highlights the company’s recent work in securing the G20 Summit 2016 in Hangzhou, China.
NSFocus was one of the security firms tasked by China’s Ministry of Public Security to secure the network and applications for the global summit.
During the summit, the firm blocked more than 133,254 web attacks on the summit’s official site and prevented 1,984 DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
Also, NSFocus managed to protect the summit’s network from a total of 41.2TB of malicious traffic.
Most of the attacks were traced back to the United States, Russia and Brazil. Said Rosefelt.
He said the magnitude of the attacks showed that cyber threats should be a priority in the increasingly digital world today.
The rapidly growing data centre industry, as well as the bustling startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, means that the region will become an even bigger target, said Rosefelt.
Also, as SMEs in Malaysia are increasingly embracing the Internet and going online, they will need proper security solutions to protect their businesses, he said. .
The company said its wide variety of security solutions, which were developed to protect large enterprises, can be tweaked for the needs of SMEs.
And the experience it gained in protecting the G20 Summit will be invaluable in protecting this region, said Rosefelt.
