More than six years ago, during MWC 2015, Vodafone officially launched Secure Net, a pioneering service with which the operator wanted protect your clients from viruses and insecure websites from 1 euros per month per line. In principle, it was only available on the mobile network, but Vodafone extended it to fiber connections last year.
Now, the operator has shared some data from the first half of 2021 and one figure stands out: during those six months, it blocked a total of 565 million threats on the Internet. What’s more, Secure Net for home, which already has more than 600,000 customers, made an average of ten times more locks per line than on the mobile network.
More than half a million threats blocked
In June, Movistar assured that its ‘Secure Connection’ service was capable of blocking more than 250 million threats per year and 45,000 malicious websites per month, most of them on mobile devices. The alternative that Vodafone proposes, Secure Net, raises that figure and speaks of more than half a million threats blocked in the first six months of 2021.
Specifically, 565 million, which means 20% more cyberattacks blocked than in the same period of the previous year. The main problem, according to the operator, has been the ‘downloaders’, a technique in which an apparently harmless application hides software that communicates with the hacker to receive instructions.
If you accidentally install it on your computer, take control and it can be done with sensitive information such as passwords to a bank account. Such has been its growth in these months, that downloaders now account for 40% of total locks and they have multiplied by seven compared to the first half of 2020.
As we mentioned at the beginning, a year ago, Vodafone extended Secure Net’s protection to the fixed access network, which already has more than 600,000 customers. In this network, the operator assures, they are made on average ten times more locks per line than on the mobile network.
The next big threat has been adware, unwanted software that continuously display ads in pop-up windows, new tabs or other browser locations without the user being able to close them. These threats represented 20% of the total in the first half and doubled in volume compared to 2020.
The third most common type of threat is the famous ‘phishing’, which consists of impersonating a trusted person or company to obtain private personal information such as passwords or bank details. However, there is a large decrease in this technique compared to last year: in 2020, it represented 44% of the total, while from January to June of this year, it barely accounted for 8% of blockages.
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