Infotech Lead India: Enterprises will spend $114 billion to deal with the impact of a malware-induced cyber-attack.
The spend by individual consumers will be 1.5 billion hours and $22 billion for identifying, repairing and recovering from the impact of malware, according to a Microsoft-commissioned study by IDC.
The study says the chances of infection by unexpected malware are one in three for consumers and three in ten for businesses using pirated software.
With has nearly half the Internet users, 40 percent of the world’s PCs, and also half the world’s pirated software, Asia-Pacific was the largest region in the study.
Enterprise survey respondents said 32 percent of their PCs come without operating systems, and 12 percent don’t install security updates. 30 percent of consumer respondents don’t install security updates, and nearly 70 percent of consumers who use pirated software have faced problems with it.
Sixty-four percent of the respondents who had used counterfeit software experienced security issues. Forty-five percent of the time counterfeit software slowed their PCs, requiring software to be uninstalled.
Forty-eight percent of respondents were worried about data loss that could be caused by using counterfeit software. Twenty-nine percent were most concerned about identity theft.
Embedding malware with counterfeit software makes unsuspecting computer users easy targets for cybercriminals.
The IDC study found that a very high percentage of corporate users download software unauthorized as per their corporate policy, exposing their workplace to security risk.
Though 38 percent of IT managers are aware that workers install personal software on employer-owned computers (57 percent). 65 percent of IT managers agree that user-installed software increases an organization’s security risks.
Respondents told IDC that only 30 percent of the software they installed on their work computers was problem-free. For many in the enterprise, user-installed software may be an understated threat to ensuring a secure network.
