Over half of organizations suffer malware incidents on remote devices

According to a new report from mobile security specialist Wandera 52 percent of organizations experienced a malware incident on a remote device in 2020, up from 37 percent in 2019.

The report is based on captured data from Wandera's global network of 425 million sensors across both corporate-owned and BYOD assets, making it the world’s largest and most insightful mobile data set.

A more worrying finding is that of devices compromised by mobile malware, 37 percent continued accessing corporate emails after being compromised and 11 percent continued accessing cloud storage.

Among other findings 28 percent of organizations were regularly utilizing an operating system with a known security vulnerability and compared to pre-pandemic times, there has been an increase of up to 100 percent in connections to inappropriate content during office hours.

"2020 saw businesses struggle to transition to fully remote operations while maintaining productivity and security. It's clear that secure remote access is imperative for organizations across industries," says Eldar Tuvey, CEO and founder of Wandera. "As we embrace a new era of work, legacy remote access tools should be abandoned in favor of a modern SASE security strategy based on zero trust."

The report also reveals that Android devices are more than five times more likely to have a vulnerable app installed than those running iOS.

There is some good news, only four percent of users connected to a risky hotspot each week, down from seven percent in 2019, though this could well be simply because people haven't been going out as much.

The full 2021 cloud security report is available from the Wandera site.

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