Thailand ranked eighth out of 20 markets in the Asia-Pacific region for ransomware attacks in the first half of 2017, says a Japan-based cybersecurity firm.
Trend Micro managing director for Asia-Pacific Dhanya Thakkar says ransomware attacks grew by 1,305% in Thailand in the first half of this year.
Thailand has mainly focused on security protection, but it still lags behind its international peers in terms of cybersecurity, specifically investment and awareness of detection implementation systems, said Dhanya Thakkar, managing director of Asia-Pacific for Trend Micro Inc.
According to Trend Micro, ransomware attacks in Thailand in the first half of the year accounted for 4% of the total in Asia-Pacific.
India and Vietnam are the top two countries in the region for ransomware attacks. Global losses from ransomware attacks could total US$4 billion (133 billion baht) for the period.
In the first half of the year, ransomware attacks grew by 4,100% in the Asia-Pacific region and 1,305% in Thailand. In 2016, Thailand was ranked third in the region, but this year Trend Micro found Thailand had dropped to eighth.
"To handle ransomware, it needs to be blocked at the source level, via either web or email gateway solutions," Mr Thakkar said.
Mr Thakkar said Asia-Pacific had the most online banking malware, with 118,193 incidents detected. Vietnam and the Philippines encountered the most malware attacks in Asean.
For the first half of the year, more than 436 million malware incidents were discovered in Asia-Pacific, the highest of any region in the world.
"Industrial Internet of Things [IoT] devices are among the top targets for malware," Mr Thakkar said, pointing out that the amount of supervisory control and data acquisition system vulnerabilities is also increasing, and attackers are more interested in hijacking those IoTs for mission-critical systems.
The Thailand 4.0 initiative involves smart city, smart farm and automotive industry upgrades -- with expectations to embrace IoT -- all of which need securing.
Trend Micro recently launched a corporate venture fund with an initial investment of $100 million for mainly IoT-related technology, which will enable the company to reach emerging IoT tech and pave the way to becoming a leading IoT security vendor.
Mr Thakkar suggested that Thailand needs to seriously consider cybersecurity regulations, a personal data protection law and data breach bills.
Faster detection by collaborating and sharing information with proper incident response is also important.
"We have embraced new technologies: machine learning, behaviour and sandbox analysis for new products, from network defence, end-user protection and hybrid cloud security," Mr Thakkar said.
