Israel’s Allot Communications, a provider of intelligent broadband solutions, has released its new Allot CloudTrends Report Q2/2015, which highlights the magnitude of web security challenges faced by today’s modern enterprise, and the significance of an effective application-aware Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) in mitigating threats.
The findings of this report indicate that, with the rise of enterprise mobility and increased cloud application adoption, employees are often unwittingly enabling access to sensitive corporate information. The use of social networking, file sharing, instant messaging and anonymizers is opening backdoors for hackers and malicious traffic to enter the organization. Not only does this waste valuable network resources and impact productivity, but it could also threaten an organization’s reputation and viability.
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Key findings of the Allot CloudTrends Report Q2/2015 include:
“Anonymized” Web traffic was blocked three times more often than overall web traffic due to malicious content. Enterprises saw an increased use of anonymizer sites like VPNBook and Tor to hide network activity, which may pose a serious security threat.
Traffic from instant messaging applications was blocked ten times more often than overall Web traffic due to malicious content.
92% of blocked Web traffic was due to AUP enforcement and just 8% was due to its identification as malicious traffic.
Even when an AUP is in place and well-communicated, the average employee made more than six attempts per day to access blocked social networking sites – half of which were attempts to access Facebook – as well as 1.5 daily attempts to access inappropriate content, such as dating and gaming sites.
More than 20% of blocked malware files were images whose file extensions would be least suspected by employees (jpg, png, gif, ico), while another 30% of blocked malware are JavaScript files – making this server-side scripting language the most common attack vehicle.
“Today’s security challenges continue to grow and evolve as enterprise mobility and cloud adoption become widespread, disrupting the boundaries of traditional security solutions, ” said Yaniv Sulkes, AVP Marketing at Allot Communications. “Our report demonstrates that companies need to adopt policies and technology solutions that are application-aware in order to prevent security breaches coming from non-business applications”.
The full Allot CloudTrends Report Q2/2015, complete with statistical graphics and charts, can be downloaded here.
The statistical information presented in this report is based on data collected from Allot’s Web Security solutions (on-premise and SECaaS) from November 2014 to April 2015 from large enterprises, and from communication service providers offering Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS) to over 200 small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers.
