14 DAY TRIAL // A recent report has discovered that around a quarter of all companies have employees that sneakily download torrent files, which most of the times are harbingers of dangerous malware.
The Peer to Peer Peril report from BitSight includes data from over 30,700 companies for which the firm provides security protection. BitSight saw P2P activity coming out of 23% of these enterprises, which in most cases is prohibited by internal company policies with the purpose of avoiding both copyright infringement, and even worse, malware infections.
In their report, BitSight analysts took a look at files shared on torrent portals and found that 39% of the games and 43% of the applications shared on these sites were infected with malware.
According to their findings, the top 5 most popular but also malware-carrying games are Grand Theft Auto V, The Sims 4, Mortal Kombat X, FIFA 15, and The Witcher 3. The top 5 malware-carrying applications are Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows 8.1, Microsoft Windows 7, and even the newest release, Microsoft Windows 10.
This doesn't mean that all file sharing traffic is infected with malware, but the high percentage of infected files is sure to eventually nab a careless employee that used their workstation to download illegal, malware-infested content.
File sharing activity is prevalent in the educational sector, more dangerous in retail
The sector with the highest percentage of companies participating in file sharing activities out of the total number of companies is the educational sector (almost 60%), followed at a large distance by the tourism, government, energy, and media/entertainment industries. This shows an endemic mentality or employee training problem, where workers fail to see the harm they could cause.
In the case of the largest amounts of traffic and shares generated through file-sharing, employees working in media and entertainment companies were the busiest, with around 28,000 shared files per company in a six-month period. Employees from the retail business were a distant second.
This comes to show that, even if most companies from the educational and tourism sector eventually end up downloading and sharing files via P2P, most of the traffic is generated by a small portion of employees in the media and retail business, where malware infections through torrented material can lead to more serious problems, such as sensitive data breaches or card fraud.
"It is clear that the consequences of file sharing on corporate networks go beyond the legal ramifications of downloading copyrighted material. This behavior can also pose a serious security threat by introducing malicious software to a corporate network," BitSight analysts conclude while also recommending that companies filter file sharing traffic through firewalls, and do a better job of enforcing internal policies regarding file sharing.
