Protect your brand against the rise of malware attacks using Sitemorse

16 Apr 2015

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An organisation’s web presence is now so important that it’s worrying to see that five out of six large global companies were targeted with malware last year.

The latest Internet Security Threat Report from cyber security firm Symantec ranked the UK second globally for targeted attacks in 2014, and top in Europe. Almost two thirds of all targeted attacks struck small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), putting not only them but their business partners and customers at higher risk.

According to the Symantec report, attackers continue to breach networks with highly targeted ‘spear-phishing’ attacks, which increased eight percent overall in 2014. Attackers also perfected ‘watering hole’ exploits, making each attack more selective by infecting legitimate websites, monitoring site visitors and targeting only the companies they wanted to attack.

Website servers can be attacked by malware just like desktop PCs. Compromising legitimate websites and using them to infect visitors is an increasingly popular tactic for online criminals.

Site owners are often unaware their site has been compromised until it is blacklisted by search engines or complaints are received from site users. The damage to reputation and customer trust can be enormous.

It’s not just large companies that are affected by this problem; small- and medium-sized businesses saw attacks increasing 26% and 30% respectively in 2014.

One of the recommendations of the security report warns web owners they should scan their web presence daily for malware. Site owners can help protect themselves and their valuable brands against this kind of problem by using the services provided by Sitemorse.

Sitemorse continually reviews your digital landscape (web, social and mobile properties) and the assets within to check for and alert you to any instances of malware - this also includes social media posts, reading every link and sending SMS or email to you highlighting you to malware or spyware.

We offer continual content assessment across your web, social and mobile pages, along with reviewing the detail within PDFs, Word / Excel or PowerPoint files - saving time and removing the tedium and inefficiency of manual checking.

Our site monitoring is not only continually checking for page availability and alerting against performance, accessibility, brand or quality issues, but is also continually reading actual page content and will immediately trigger a warning email or text message to site managers if there is a DNS change, if key attributes are noticed as missing or if there is a significant change of overall content, something that might indicate malicious activity.

The full 119-page threat report from Symantec can be downloaded by registering from http://www.symantec.com/security_response/publications/threatreport.jsp

malware scanning and protection from sitemorse


More about Sitemorse

Sitemorse has been around for well over a decade, and we were the first in the market to supply a service helping clients to have “web confidence” that their online presence was working well and offering a great customer experience.

The online world these days is much more fast-moving, with increasing complexity, competition, and regulation.

Our uniquely clever Sitemorse software engine can make easy work of analysing your digital content, and gives you 20;20 digital vision, pointing you straight to the things you need to change to make sure you are continually improving.

Whatever industry or public sector niche you are in, our powerful quarterly INDEX reports will show you just where you stand in relation to your peers.

We are so confident that our services can help you that we will give you complimentary access to your organisations reports, so you can see for yourself how your online assets compare with your peers.