PRESS RELEASE: Much like everyone else, connected ships continue to face the annoyance of spam and the menace of cyber-attacks on their IT systems. Over 18% of emails scanned in the second quarter of this year were rejected as spam and just under 1% stopped because they contained viruses or damaging malware.
It’s a smaller percentage compared to the global spam average of 45%, and that’s because Dualog takes email security very seriously and its Dualog Platform with email, file transfer and internet services, is built to the highest standards of cyber resilience and security.
How can then the percentage be lower? As one of the world’s leading providers of cyber secure IT services to the shipping industry, all data traffic within and between our customers’ ships and offices is verified and secure, meaning that there will be a larger number of always secure emails.
We scanned a total of 19.3 million emails for viruses and other threats in the second quarter of 2018 alone. From the incoming messages, 160,482 were identified as phishing emails with links to unsecure websites while a total of 148,010 viruses or malware were detected and stopped. That meant processing a staggering 180 Terabytes (or 180,000,000 MB) of data in the period.
Walter Hannemann, Product Manager at Dualog, said that while the number of cyber-attacks was not on the increase compared to the last quarter, it was not reducing either. But the percentage swing between emails with viruses or those with phishing malware was constantly changing, depending on what phishing campaigns were in vogue.
“The attacks are also worldwide with infected computers used by spammers via bots often based in different countries. This is a widespread problem, especially when you consider we have seen a gradual increase in the overall use of emails in ships, many with data attachments,” he said.
