Avast’s latest Global PC Risk Report, looked at PC threats Avast blocked in March and April 2021, and the same timeframe in 2020. The report also shows that in the UK, the likelihood of a business user encountering any type of PC malware is 11 percent.

Avast Director of Threat Intelligence Michal Salat said that the pandemic, enabled staff to work from home at short notice and posed serious challenges to business security.

"Not every company was prepared with secure business VPNs and remote access solutions, and cybercriminals 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 investigates 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 two per cent risk ratio, and global business users 2.29 percent.

The Global Scenario

Geographies with more conflictive socio-political situations seem to be facing more risk in the online world as well. Asian countries are among the top countries where businesses are most at risk, followed by Africa and Eastern Europe.

The top 10 countries in which business users are most at risk of encountering threats are:

For all types of threats, the geographies with the lowest risk were the Nordics, Western and Central European countries, in addition to the United States, Latvia and the Dominican Republic. This changes when looking at advanced threats, where the common denominator seems to be the size of the countries with populations smaller than 11 million.