Trend Micro Incorporated , the leader in cybersecurity solutions , has released a new consolidated report that reveals COVID-19-related threats and highlights that this is the largest threat type in the first half of 2020. In just six months, Trend Micro blocked 8.8 million COVID-19-related threats . Of these, nearly 92% were email. -based
Of the threats detected, more than 37,700 were detected in Hong Kong, of which more than 25,000 were email. Trend Micro found email that claimed to provide the latest news and updates about the virus, but in fact distributed malware to their recipients.
Cybercriminals turned their attention to COVID-19 from January to June, taking advantage of the global interest in the pandemic. The risk to businesses gaps security created by the forced remote work regime.
“The pandemic has been a major theme in our lives in the first half of 2020, but it hasn’t slowed down cybercriminals,” said Tony Lee, consultant at Trend Micro Hong Kong and Macau. “IT professionals must continue to adapt their cybersecurity strategies to take into account the increased threats that the new normal has brought. This means increased protection of remote endpoints, cloud systems, credentials user ” and VPN systems, as well as refresher training courses to enable the workforce to be a more effective first line of defense.
Overall, Trend Micro blocked 27.8 billion threats in the first half of 2020, of which 93% were via email.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks increased by 19% since the second half of 2019, perhaps because fraudsters are trying to exploit remote work, which makes employees more vulnerable to social engineering.
Ransomware attacks also posed a significant threat in the first half of 2020. Although the number of detected ransomware attacks decreased, Trend Micro observed a 45% increase in new ransomwarecompared to last year.
Researchers also observed a significant increase in vulnerabilities that many global organizations are vulnerable to. Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) published a total of 786 advisory guides, indicating a 74% increase from the second half of 2019. Some of the advisories were issued as part of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates, which patch an average of 103 CVEs per month (in 2020). In fact, the largest patch was released in June, fixing 129 vulnerabilities .
To effectively protect corporate networks, Gartner recommends that enterprises improve their security monitoring capabilities. Trend Micro XDR helps customers do just that by correlating security incidents across the entire IT environment, which is critical for holistic enterprise protection in the second half of 2020.
For more information on threats in the first half of 2020, see Trend Micro's full report.
