The company’s Southeast Asia and Hong Kong vice-president, Peerapong Jongvibool, said the attacks included viruses, botnets and exploits detected by its FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity solutions, making the country one of the most vulnerable locations in the region.
According to FortiGuard Labs, there were 61.1 million virus detections, 50.2 million botnet attacks and 7.5 billion exploit detections in Malaysia throughout the quarter.
“(By comparison), cyber threats on the global scale in that period were around 200 billion attacks per day,” Jongvibool told Bernama.
“Fortinet was able to detect the threats and neutralise them with our artificial intelligence (AI) technology as well as machine learning capabilities.”
He said exploits have become the latest technique adopted by cyber attackers, where they plant malware on their target’s devices while waiting for the right time to execute the attack.
“The trend of cyber attacks is definitely going up every day as more people are adopting digitalisation in their daily business, making them more exposed.
“In a nutshell, the attackers are smarter now (and) are more weaponised in their planning by using AI,” he said.
Jongvibool said notable challenges faced by the cybersecurity industry would include the complexity of the digital environment where applications are distributed, users work from anywhere, more devices are attached to applications, and there is a shortage of cybersecurity skills.
He said Fortinet is now the provider of nearly half of the firewall deployments around the globe, a significant achievement and improvement over the past year.
“Last year, we only talked about one-third of the whole firewall deployments in the world belong to us, now we are almost hitting the 50% mark, and we are able to detect more cyber attacks in the market.
“From a global perspective, we are able to show very detailed data of new techniques adopted by the attackers and how they plan their attack, with what kind of malware or exploit they are using,” he said.
Moving forward, Jongvibool said Fortinet’s plans would extend beyond just technological innovation as it has set targets to achieving a sustainable society and closing the cybersecurity skills gap in the market.
He said the company aims to be carbon neutral by 2030, with the adoption of higher power efficiency application-specific integrated circuit chipset on their design that generally consumes less power when operating.
“Fortinet also pledged to provide training to one million people in cybersecurity by 2026, as we have achieved our initial target of one million people certified with Fortinet Network Security Expert (NSE) way before 2023,” he said.