A recent research indicates that pornographic content watched by executives are linked to malware on office omputers.
According to a recent research published by Threat Track Security, office executives play an important but unintentional role in assisting hackers breach their companies' security system.
"Among the issues that malware analysts face: more than half said they've had to remove malware from the device of a member of senior leadership because the executive clicked on a malicious link in a phishing e-mail, while nearly 40% had to remove malware after a senior executive visited an infected pornographic website," per Threat Track Security.
The research conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of Threat Track Security and the study was based on surveys conducted on 200 security professionals at some large U.S. businesses.
The result of the research indicates that 56 percent of the surveyed executive confirmed that they have had to remove a malware infection caused by clicking on a link sent in a phishing email. The research also suggests that other mistakes by upper-management include plugging an infected device into a PC, letting family members use a company computer, visiting pornographic websites and installing a malicious app.
Malware analysts say that they have sufficient tools to protect their company's computers against cyber attacks; however, internal challenges from some executives forbid them from completely defending their computer system against malware threats.
Even though malware analysts can remove unwanted and threatening software from the companies system, it can take them quite a lot of time to clean the malware from a device or network. The research indicates that more than half of all malware analysts say that it usually takes them over two hours to analyze a new malware sample. However, around four percent malware analysts said that they can clean an infected device or network in less than an hour.
Usually, big companies have strict computer system usage policy at work place. However, it seems that many top-executives seem to be overlooking company policy and bringing in malware threat to their computer system.
