The story of the year so far
The 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Mid-Year Report Update is out this month and it makes for pretty grim reading. Each year, SonicWall releases an in-depth cybersecurity industry report that analyses threat intelligence and cyberattack behaviour from the previous 12 months. But the cyber arms race moves with great agility and purpose, so much so, SonicWall is publishing the first mid-year update to its annual report.
It’s critical that the greater public and the business world is armed with as much cyber threat intelligence as possible to help safeguard sensitive data, networks and applications.
The first thing to note is that there has been a 102% increase in the volume of malware in 2018 compared to the same 6month period in 2017.
This is a direct indication that the criminals, organisations and nation states that invest in malicious cyber activity are seeing a worthwhile return for their efforts, meaning they will continue to develop new attack methods.
This of course makes the challenge for the cyber security industry all the more difficult. The increased investment needed to successfully mitigate the billions of threats means that the end user is having to spend more on security products and services to protect themselves, their network and their data.
Understandably this can lead to the temptation to either cut corners in security, or even go without it. A dangerous strategy indeed and one that will most likely end up costing more.
The sensible thing to do is to work with and put your trust in to a reputable IT support / IT security company to get the most cost effective, most effective muti-layered security set up. A good managed service provider will stay on top of your security, giving your business the best opportunity to navigate through the cybersecurity minefield.
More headlines from the SonicWall report:
After a downturn in 2017, ransomware has had a massive resurgence in 2018. There have been many new variants identified and analysed and they all leveraged a variety of clever new tactics to help compromise targeted machines.
Encrypted attacks are also at a record high. In 2017, sessions encrypted by SSL/TLS standards represented 68% of total traffic. Without the ability to inspect encrypted traffic during this 12month period, the average organisation would have missed more than 900 file-based attacks hidden by SSL/TLS encryption.
There has been a massive growth in crypto-jacking. With the popularity of cryptocurrency going mainstream, cybercriminals have moved quickly to take advantage. Rather than investing in crypto-mining hardware and infrastructure like other hopeful billionaires in the making……online criminals have opted to employ crypto-jacking instead.
Crypto-jacking is a method of compromising a network of random machines, usually by commandeering websites to deliver malware exploits and then using the processing power of the botnet to illegally mine for cryptocurrency. In effect stealing the victims processing power from their devices.
Constantly evolving cybercrime methods with increasing levels of sophistication are here to stay, but it isn’t all bad news in so far as there are lots of extremely talented and creative ‘good guys’ out there, working hard on our behalf to keep us safe.
SonicWall is one of a number of Best in Class security providers that Intrasource partners with to bring our customers the most effective security options. If you have concerns about IT security or would like an impartial 3rd party audit, please contact us for a discussion
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