Around 817 new cooperatives were established in the country during 2022, according to the Institute for Cooperative Development and Credit (IDECOOP). However, there are differences in technological and cybersecurity maturity in each of them. Based on the twelve IDECOPP regional centers in the national territory, the evolution of these cooperatives depends on their formation time, for example, in the province of San Juan de la Maguana, this 2022, 65 new cooperatives have been created.
The regional director of IDECOPP, Victor Emmanuel Nova reports “In total we have about 102 cooperatives and not all of them are at the same level in terms of cybersecurity implementation. Those that have just been born have many fragilities, due to the short time they have been operating”.
“We have been able to detect that many of the cooperatives do not have digital platforms in place and when the structure exists, logistics and staff preparation are lacking,” explains the regional director, Francisco Dotel, attached to Bahoruco and Independencia, which currently brings together 76 cooperatives with growth forecast to 36 more.
For the cybersecurity company of ESET, a leader in proactive threat detection, present in the country since 2021, the reason for being of the associations should be directly linked to the trust that their partners have placed in them. Therefore, a security flaw, a ransomware infection, a personal data leak or poorly managed criticism on social networks can break that trust.
“Because the threat landscape is becoming more complex, as experts in the field, we want to provide organizations with tools to keep their assets safe in the event of a potential incident. It is our job to train and provide advice on how to protect corporate assets“, points out the economist and cybersecurity technician Bernabé Aguilar, country manager of ESET. “That essential to protect the reputation and keep the systems, the web page, the mail server safe email or the information they handle.
The most recent edition of ESET Security Report (ESR), a report carried out by ESET in which the state of information security in Latin American companies is evaluated, highlights that in the last year one of every two organizations claimed to have suffered a security incident and that one of every four incidents was related to malware. This study involved more than 1,800 technology professionals and company managers in 17 countries and included data obtained from ESET telemetry systems.
Malware infection was the main culprit in 24% of these incidents, with phishing and vulnerability exploitation being the two main initial access routes used by attackers to gain access to the organization’s network. However, these were not the only types of security incidents reported, as a 13% of the entities surveyed stated that they had suffered unauthorized access and 5% were victims of information leaks.
“Beyond the technology used, another key aspect of a company’s security has to do with management. According to surveys, 71% of organizations have a security policy and 68% have an application update policy. Nevertheless, only 37% have an incident response plan and a business continuity plan”, adds the manager of ESET in the Dominican Republic.
The first step to protect any business is to identify the vulnerabilities to which it is exposed. “On many occasions, the person is aware of a large part of the risks, but perhaps there are others that you are not aware of and that, if they materialize, would put the company they work for in serious trouble”concludes the executive.
