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HA NOI (Biz Hub) — US-based Symantec Corp announced early this week in Ha Noi new additions to its leading technologies that protect organisations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, from targeted attacks.

Defending against sophisticated attacks is now the norm, and it's not just large companies that are being affected. Targeted attacks against businesses with fewer than 250 employees are growing significantly. Globally, small businesses are the target of 31 per cent of all such attacks.

Small companies are an attractive target for cyber criminals as they have fewer security safeguards and often have business relationships with larger companies, which may be the ultimate target of attackers.

"One of the main concerns for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and IT managers today is safeguarding their organisations against evolving targeted attacks which have become an established part of the threat landscape," said Raymond Goh, Symantec's Senior Director of Systems Engineering, Asia South Region.

"The new technologies, combined with our comprehensive solution portfolio, will protect organisations in Viet Nam from threats at the gateway, on the endpoint and in the data centre," he added.

Most targeted attacks are now in the form of malicious but seemingly innocuous documents delivered over email. Each such malicious document, like a PDF, DOC or XLS file, contains an embedded attack. When a victim simply views the document, his computer is automatically and silently compromised.

To deal with this problem, companies could use powerful new innovations including Disarm technology in Symantec Messaging Gateway and Network Threat Protection in Symantec Endpoint Protection for Mac computers.

The new Disarm technology in Symantec Messaging Gateway uses a first-of-a-kind technique to protect companies from targeted attacks.

Traditional protection technologies attempt to scan documents for suspicious characteristics. The problem is that many of these document-based attacks are deliberately crafted so that they don't look suspicious and as a result, they go undetected.

Disarm technology takes a whole new approach. Instead of scanning the document, it essentially makes a digital, harmless copy of every incoming email attachment/document, and delivers this copy to the recipient, rather than the original, potentially malicious document. The result is that the recipient is never exposed to the attacker's malicious attachment, said Goh. — VNS