An average business in India has been hit by 1,565 attacks per week from hackers over the past six months, compared to 474 attacks per organization globally, according to a new report. According to researchers at Israeli firm Check Point Research, 93% of malicious files in India were delivered via the web, compared to 35% of malicious files globally. The most common type of vulnerability exploit in India is information disclosure, affecting 64% of organizations, and the top malware in India is “XMRig,” affecting 17% of businesses, Check Point’s Cyber Security report said.
2019 presented a complex threat landscape, where nations, cybercrime organizations, and private contractors accelerated the cyber, increasing each other’s capabilities at an alarming rate, and this will continue into 2020,” said Lotem Finkelsteen. It is pertinent to note that cryptominers continue to dominate the malware. Despite the fact that cryptomining has declined during 2019, linked to the decline in the value of cryptocurrencies and the closure of the Coinhive operation in March, 38% of companies worldwide were affected by cryptominers in 2019, up from 37% in 2018. This is because the use of cryptominers remains a low-risk, high-reward activity for criminals.
Detecting and automatically blocking attacks at an early stage can prevent damage. Check Point’s 2020 Security Report outlines the needs organizations need to address and how they can win the war against cyberattacks through key best practices, Finkelsteen added. 28% of organizations worldwide have been affected by botnets, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2018.
Emotet was the most common bot malware, largely due to its flexibility in enabling malicious and spamming services. Other botnet activities, such as email sextortion activity and DDoS attacks, also saw a sharp increase in 2019. While the number of organizations affected is relatively low, the severity of the attack is much higher – as demonstrated by the damaging 2019 attacks on US city governments. Criminals are carefully selecting their ransomware targets, aiming to wipe out as much revenue as possible. Specifically, 27% of organizations worldwide were affected by cyberattacks involving mobile devices in 2019, down from 33% in 2018. As the mobile threat landscape matures, organizations are becoming more aware of the threat and are deploying greater protection for mobile devices. Currently, over 90% of enterprises use Cloud services, yet 67% of security teams complain about a lack of visibility into their Cloud infrastructure, security , and compliance. The magnitude of Cloud attacks and breaches continued to increase in 2019.
Misconfiguration of cloud resources remains the number one cause of cloud attacks, but we are now also seeing a growing number of attacks targeting cloud service providers directly. “Even if an organization is equipped with the most comprehensive, state-of-the-art security products, the risk of being breached cannot be completely eliminated. Beyond detection and remediation, organizations must adopt a plan to continuously stay ahead of hackers and prevent attacks,” Finkelsteen explained.
