Security experts from the CheckPoint Software Technologies, the Israel based cybersecurity firm say that the security factor in our mobile phones is extremely weak making them vulnerable to cyber attacks in a big way in 2019.
Tony Jarvis, a Security Evangelist for Asia Pacific region, CheckPoint Technologies said that the vulnerability scale in the year 2018 has seen new heights and the current year will witness cyber attacks of massive range and sophistication.
Whilst releasing the Global Risks Report 2019, Gill Shwed, the CEO of CheckPoint Technologies highlighted a report stat saying that data theft will stand as the top risk in the year 2019, while Gen V( 5th Generation) cyber attacks swept the globe last year.
Note- Differentiating cyber attacks generational wise was something which the security experts from CheckPoint introduced to the world. In their cyber threat dictionary, first generation cyber attacks were virus threats on floppy discs that would infect a single computer. The 2nd generation attacks were those which infected networked computers with viruses. 3rd generation attacks were browser-based cyber threats. 4th Generation of attacks was Polymorphic attacks where the virus has the ability to change its traits based on the system and the environment which it is trying to intercept. And as per the CheckPoint analysis, the 5Th generation attacks are those which take place so fast that preventive- that too proactive measures are required to counter them- rather than reactive measures.
“In today’s world, it’s a fact that our mobile phones contain more info than our desktops. But the manufacturers or the OS makers aren’t focusing much on security making them vulnerable to cyber attacks”, said Jarvis.
Highlighting attacks which topped the year 2018, Jarvis said that online attacks and Cryptocurrency mining attacks followed by Banking Trojans, phishing and other forms of malware were mostly analyzed by their company in last year. Also, Ransomware developers became lethal as they started to use cryptocurrency to keep their activities concealed from law enforcement agencies.
