Cyber attacks increase by 20 percent to over 62,6 billion in 2020. Results of Trend Micro's annual round-up report support strategic security planning for 2021.
Trend Micro, one of the world's leading IT security providers, publishes its review of cybersecurity developments over the past year. The report found that the company detected and blocked 119.000 cyber attacks per minute over the past year. The attacks put both private users and corporate infrastructures under great pressure.
Looking for a gateway to corporate networks
According to the Trend Micro report, home networks in particular have been targeted by cyber criminals. These were looking for a gateway into company networks or had the goal of compromising IoT devices and integrating them into botnets. Trend Micro found that the number of attacks on homes increased 210 percent year over year to nearly 2,9 billion. The vast majority (73 percent) of these attacks were brute force attacks with the aim of gaining control of a router or smart device.
Email attacks accounted for 91 percent of the 62,6 billion threats Trend Micro blocked last year. About 1,03 billion of these attacks occurred in Germany. This makes it the sixth most affected country worldwide. In addition, phishing attacks are still very popular with cyber criminals. The Japanese security provider detected nearly 2020 million unique phishing URLs used by cyber criminals to target inattentive homeworkers in 14.
2020: the year of phishing and cyber attacks
The past year was particularly characterized by phishing and other cyber attacks that took advantage of the corona pandemic. Trend Micro has documented almost 16,4 million such threats, composed of malicious URLs, spam and malware attacks. In a global comparison, Germany was the second most affected by such attacks, with almost 2,4 million or 14,6 percent of detections, only outbid by the USA.
“In 2020, companies were confronted with an unprecedented level of threats that affected their entire infrastructure and numerous employees working from home. Well-known tactics such as phishing and brute force attacks as well as the exploitation of vulnerabilities are still the primary means of attack. This knowledge can help with the implementation of countermeasures, ”says Richard Werner, Business Consultant at Trend Micro. “Companies have now had some time to understand the effects of the pandemic on their own operations and the cyber risk. Accordingly, the new year brings with it the chance of realignment. A cloud-based approach strengthens the security architecture of a company and also fully protects remote employees and systems. "
The Trend Micro report from sees important developments
- The number of newly discovered ransomware families rose by 34 percent, with "double blackmail attacks" and targeted attacks enjoying increasing popularity. For example, attackers steal data in order to encrypt it in a next step and extort a ransom by threatening to publish the information. Government, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors have been most exposed to these attacks.
- The number of vulnerabilities published by Trend Micros Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) increased by 40 percent compared to the previous year. In addition, it should be noted that weak points, some of which have been known since 2005, are still regularly exploited.
- Many cyber attacks have targeted VPN vulnerabilities that are particularly used by remote employees. Trend Micro has already blocked almost 800.000 attempts to exploit CVE-2019-11510, a critical arbitrary file disclosure vulnerability in Pulse Connect Secure.
- Misconfigurations in the cloud had increasing consequences in 2020. Trend Micro observed the exploitation of unsecured APIs in several crypto mining attacks.
- The ZDI published 1.453 vulnerability reports, almost 80 percent of which were classified as critical or with a high degree of severity.
To the 2020 Annual Cybersecurity Report at TrendMicro .com
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