IT security report finds 97% have suspicious network activity

The suspicious network activities revealed in the research by Positive Technologies are traffic hiding, VPN tunneling, connections to the Tor anonymous network, and network proxying.The importance of IT security has been known for a long time, but you wouldn't know that anyone was doing anything about it based on a new analysis of network security practices at a sampling of 36 companies in Eastern Europe. The 13-page study, "Top Cybersecurity Threats on what is the difference between computer science and computer engineering" which was performed using advanced network traffic analysis tools, found that 97% of the surveyed companies show evidence of suspicious activity in their network traffic and that 81% of the companies were being subject to malicious activity. 

The study, which is based on research gathered in 2019 by IT security vendor Positive Technologies, was released March 17. The companies that were evaluated in the research each had at least 1,000 employees and were reviewed for an average of one month as part of pilot projects for Positive Technologies' latest Network Attack Discovery product.

"In one in every three companies, there were traces of scans of its internal network, which could potentially mean that hackers are gathering intelligence inside the infrastructure. This includes network scans, multiple failed attempts to connect to hosts, and traces of collecting intelligence on active network sessions on a specific host or in the entire domain."