By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Employees who visit porn or gambling websites double the risk of a company being infected by a computer virus, warns new research.
The cybersecurity study calculated the odds of encountering seven kinds of malicious software, or malware, which is a worldwide threat to network security for businesses and other organizations.
Individual users within those networks may inadvertently download or interact with malware – such as viruses or ransomware – by browsing unsafe websites, downloading software, or clicking on phishing links in emails.
Researchers from the University of Trento in Italy and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in Holland and the global cybersecurity firm Trend Micro wanted to know what behaviours bring the greatest risk of malware infection.
They looked at the impacts of working at night, browsing adult content, gambling, having a lot of software installed or just visiting strange places.
Categories of malware included in the analysis were virus, trojan, worm, hacking tools – which remotely control the victim’s computer, coinminers – which use the victim’s CPU to mine bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, ransomware, and other potentially unwanted applications (PUAs).
Gambling sites were found to be a major risk for coin miners, doubling the odds of encountering this software.
Porn sites doubled the risk for PUA and were also a major risk for trojans and hacking tools.
Illegal sites that discuss how to perpetrate non-violent crimes show a three to five times increase in the odds of encountering PUAs, trojans, hacktools, and viruses.
Visiting a large volume of unknown websites of many different kinds was also a risk factor.
But browsing online mostly at night rather than during the day made no difference to risk.
The study identified users’ behavioral characteristics that can be used to differentiate an organization’s cybersecurity risk profile.
Fabio Massacci, coordinator of the European project Sec4AI4Sec on AI and security and member of the Dutch NWO Theseus project on security patching, said different organizations may be more susceptible to specific malware threats.
He says governments and defense contractors may consider hack tools, used to gain unauthorized access to networks, their “most significant” threat.
But healthcare institutions may be more concerned with the existential threat of an employee’s encounter with ransomware — which can lock access to critical data.
Massacci said: “A key takeaway of our study is that there is no bulleted list of best practices that will be equally cost-effective across the board.
“But by knowing which user behaviors are associated with which classes of malware, an organization can proactively reduce its cybersecurity risks in a cost-effective manner for the specific malware threats they consider existential.”
Marco Balduzzi, technical research lead at Trend Micro’s Forward-Looking Threat Research (FTR) team, added: “This study serves as a foundation for the proactive detection and anticipation of attacks by leveraging users’ behaviors for anticipating threats.”
Massacci presented the findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis in Austin, Texas.
