Source: asiainsurancereview.com

Phishing attacks against small and medium sized businesses in Singapore have increased by more than 60% in the first 10 months of this year – a worrying sign at a time when SMEs are accelerating digitalisation efforts in the wake of COVID-19.

Global cyber security company Kaspersky’s anti-phishing software applications prevented 89,351 phishing attempts against companies with 50-250 employees, a 60.5% increase compared with the same period last year.

In addition to phishing attacks, Kaspersky also detected 14,141 cryptomining attempts on Singapore SMEs in the first half of this year, an 89.7% increase when compared with the same time period in 2019. Cryptomining is the unauthorised use of someone else’s computer to mine cryptocurrency. This is also known as malicious mining. Cyber criminals use a variety of covert means to install mining programmes on other people’s computers and take all the profits from cryptocurrency mining. In addition, cryptomining can also overwhelm a system thus causing severe performance problems.

Kaspersky recommends the following tips for SMEs to build up their cyber-resilience during COVID-19:

– Any website that requests or processes user data must have an SSL certificate, and almost all browsers warn users that sites without an SSL certificate are insecure. Hence it is important to renew the corporate site security certificate on a regular basis

– Update your router firmware regularly to prevent cyber criminals from exploiting the old firmware to infiltrate your corporate network

– Audit your account privileges regularly. Employees who are no longer working at your company should not have access to your data

– Back up your data frequently to protect it from wipers, ransomware, careless employees and other hazards