UK businesses are facing a monthly risk ratio of 11% of getting attacked by any type of PC malware, according to Avast's latest Global Risk Report.
The study shows that the overall chance of business users encountering a cyber threat has increased worldwide year over year by 24%, from 11.25% to 13.9%.
The report looks at PC threats blocked by Avast in March and April 2021, and the same timeframe in 2020.
“In the pandemic, enabling the staff to work from home at such short notice has posed serious challenges to business security," stated Michal Salat, Director of Threat Intelligence at Avast.
"Not every company was prepared with secure business VPNs and remote access solutions, and cyber criminals have taken advantage of this.
"We observed an increased abuse of the remote desktop protocol, and specifically have seen ransomware attacks become more prevalent.
“Overall, the risk ratio of businesses encountering malware attacks has increased worldwide.”
The report also looks into the risk of ‘advanced’ threats hitting businesses.
Avast defines more sophisticated or threats never seen before as ‘advanced’ threats, designed to bypass common protection technologies included in security software, such as signatures, heuristics, emulators, URL filtering, and email scanning.
For this type of threat, UK business users in the reported timeframe had a 2% risk ratio, and global business users 2.29%.