25% of Medium-Size Businesses in UAE May Use Pirated Software to Cut Costs

According to Kaspersky, a leading cyber security company in the UAE, 24 per cent of medium-size companies in the UAE are ready to use pirated alternatives of business software to decrease IT spending.

The report by Kaspersky revealed that decision makers in almost a quarter of companies with 50 to 999 employees in the Emirates consider using pirated software to decrease costs. This percentage, however, is much lower among small businesses (less than 50 employees), with only 13% being ready to take this step.

A lack of resources is a common situation for small and medium businesses but use of a pirated orhacked software should be completely excluded if an organization values its safety, reputation and income. Pirated copies of software usually come with Trojans and miners and do not contain the fixes or patches released by developers to close vulnerabilities that might be exploited by cybercriminals,

says Alexander Shlychkov, Product Marketing Lead at Kaspersky.

According to Kaspersky, this measure can seriously affect corporate cyber safety, since adversaries actively distribute malicious files under the guise of popular programmes. In just eight months the total number of users who encountered malware and unwanted software masquerading as the most popular software products for small and medium businesses was 9,685.

As for the type of programs respondents believe they could replace with hacked copies, the majority chose project management, marketing and sales software - 60% even agree to use a pirated cybersecurity software.