KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia experienced an average of 84 million cyber attacks every day during the fourth quarter of 2022 (Q4’22), according to global cybersecurity solutions provider Fortinet.
Fortinet Southeast Asia and Hong Kong vice-president Peerapong Jongvibool said the attacks included viruses, botnets, and exploits detected by its FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity solutions, making the country one of the most vulnerable locations in the region.
According to FortiGuard Labs, the cyber threats in Malaysia registered a total of 61.1 million virus detections, 50.2 million botnet attacks, and 7.5 billion exploit detections throughout Q4’22.
“(By comparison), cyber threats on the global scale in Q4 2022 recorded around 200 billion attacks per day.
“Fortinet was able to detect the threats and neutralise them with our artificial intelligence (AI) technology as well as machine learning capabilities,” he told Bernama in an exclusive interview recently.
Jongvibool said that exploits have become the latest technique adopted by cyber attackers when they planted malware on their target’s devices while waiting for the right time to execute the attack.
“The trend of cyber attacks is definitely going up every day as more people are adopting digitalisation in their daily business, making them more exposed.
“In a nutshell, the attackers are now smarter (and) they are now more weaponised in their planning by using the AI because it is not for fun anymore but for serious business,” he said.
Jongvibool said that notable challenges faced by the cybersecurity industry today include the complexity of the digital environment where applications are distributed, users working from anywhere, more devices attached to applications, and a cybersecurity skills shortage.
He highlighted that Fortinet is now the provider of nearly half of the firewall deployments around the globe, a significant improvement over the past year.
“Last year we only talked about one-third of the whole firewall deployments in the world belong to us, now we are almost hitting the 50% mark and we are able to detect more cyber attacks in the market.”
Jongvibool said Fortinet’s plans extend beyond just technological innovation as it set targets to achieving a sustainable society and closing the cybersecurity skills gap in the market.
He said the company aims to be carbon neutral by 2030, with the adoption of higher power efficiency application-specific integrated circuit chipsets in their designs that generally consume less power.
