It is becoming increasingly easy for so-called fledgling cyber criminals to learn how to stage attacks on businesses and individual users, according to Symantec.
There was an increase in the number of cyber-attacks because mechanisms like attack toolkits were being used by more and more criminals.
Graham Ahearne, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) technical product manager at Symantec, said that people didn’t need programming skills or experience around networking as the toolkits were sophisticated enough to do the work for you.
He said: “You can download an attack toolkit from the internet for [a certain] number of dollars – it’s basically a DIY, drag-and-drop access that you can use to build your own malware.”
People who enjoy flexible mobile working and rely on laptops and phones must ensure that they have adequate security to protect themselves from such attacks.
His comments follow last month’s announcement from Kaspersky Lab that a strain of malware known as TDL4 had infected 4.5 million computers.
Computers that are infected by TDL4 become part of a ‘botnet’, meaning they can be controlled remotely by the originator.
