Keeping cyberspace safe
- By Yin Pumin
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E-mail Beijing Review, March 20, 2014
A new battlefield
Today, a new security challenge is posed by the fact that more people and companies are using mobile devices for their businesses.
A total of 648 million people in China were using mobile phones to access the Internet in 2013, an increase of more than 54 percent year on year, according to CNNIC statistics.
With the majority of Chinese companies using mobile devices in their daily business, attackers are eyeing the mobile Internet for loopholes in corporate systems.
"About 57 percent of enterprise data centers will be running on the cloud by 2015. The centralization of information may help hackers steal large amounts of information by attacking one cloud-computing facility," said Wu Hequan, Chairman of the China Communications Standard Association and an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Because most company executives are using smartphones or tablets to access their business e-mail or undisclosed company information, breaches of these mobile devices could cause serious damage to the target companies, said Tang Tiebing, a security expert at NQ Mobile Inc., a leading mobile security provider in China.
"Although no major data losses were reported in the mobile sector, it does not mean that these services are safe," Tang added. "It is highly possible that somebody has been using mobile devices to collect company information for quite some time without being caught."
According to a survey released by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) last December, less than a quarter of companies on the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong were adequately prepared for an information security incident. Average financial loss due to breach of security in 2013 was $1.8 million on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong, higher than the Asia-Pacific average of $1.6 million.
Meanwhile, a report released by Beijing Rising Information Technology Co. Ltd. on January 14 revealed that more than 800,000 newly developed smartphone viruses were detected in 2013, "dozens of times" higher than the previous year.
Official statistics show that app stores and online cell phone forums contributed to 62 percent of malware transmitted among mobile phones.
To crack down on the trend, the Anti-Network-Virus Alliance of China (ANVA) has released a list of 23 reliable app stores. Smartphone users are advised to download apps only from authorized sources.
However, a report by Qihoo 360 and research firm Gartner warned that by 2020, there will be a sharp increase in "advanced targeted attacks" that could bypass traditional protection mechanisms and persist undetected for extended periods of time.
Aware of the serious damage of cyberattacks, many companies in China have taken action. For example, nearly 80 percent of large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises have started adopting business security software protection, said Qihoo 360.
Use of office computers for personal use, ineffective Wi-Fi management and delayed vulnerability fixes are among the most pressing security issues for companies based in China, Qihoo 360 said, adding that the device with the lowest security decides the security level of the entire enterprise network system.
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