Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky says it detected more than 4.7 million web threat attempts on the computers of Kaspersky Security Network participants in Thailand in the second quarter.
"Overall, 20% of Thai users faced this type of threat," the company said in a statement.
Kaspersky is urging the Thai government to work with neighbouring countries and the private sector to level up cyberdefence in their nations.
Genie Gan, head of public affairs and government relations for Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Kaspersky, said while Thailand's cybersecurity landscape is "distinct" from other Asean countries, it is interconnected to the region.
"This is why we encourage government regulators to begin boosting their cyber capacity-building and cooperation efforts. These two are basically the building blocks of cybersecurity," she said.
Ms Gan said Thailand is now in the intermediate stage of cybersecurity readiness, which means the country has identified cyber-attacks as areas that need to be looked into and has made some attempts to address them.
"The goal is to have the country move to the advanced stage where we hope to see it doing more in terms of development," she said.
According to Kaspersky, cyber-attacks on ICT supply chains are on the rise.
The firm said vulnerabilities can be found at any phase, such as design, development, production, distribution, acquisition and deployment to maintenance.
Ms Gan said four approaches can be used to strengthen the ICT supply chain in Thailand.
The first is to develop core principles and technical standards to ensure a consistent level of cybersecurity across all the companies involved. The second is to pursue actionable national cybersecurity strategies and the third involves the improvement of procedures and regulations for ICT supply chain infrastructure. The last is to upgrade private and public cooperation as well as cybersecurity capacity-building.
The company is also urging Thailand to promote skill training and collaboration to support incident response capabilities.
"Cyberthreats are here to stay, existing in parallel with the digitalisation drive in Thailand," said Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager for Southeast Asia at Kaspersky.
"A recent study projected a US$57 billion digital economy in 2025, a huge opportunity that will be best realised if digitalisation efforts are built upon trusted and transparent cybersecurity foundations."
Kaspersky said it has a cyber capacity-building programme to help state, private and academic organisations develop mechanisms and skills for security assessment of ICT products they use.
