Email-borne cyber threats made up 91 per cent of the 62.6 billion threats
Cyber security firm Trend Micro on Wednesday said that 119,000 cyber threats per minute were detected in 2020, which led to blocking of 62.6 billion threats last year.
Indicating that phishing attacks continued to be hugely popular, email-borne cyber threats made up 91 per cent of the 62.6 billion threats blocked last year.
In 2020, 14 million unique phishing URLs were detected by the company as attackers targeted distracted home workers.
A report titled “A Constant State of Flux: Trend Micro 2020 Annual Cyber security Report” said, for cyber criminals looking to pivot to corporate systems, or compromise and conscript IoT (Internet of Things) devices into botnets, home networks were a major draw last year.
Trend Micro found attacks on homes surged 210 per cent to reach nearly 2.9 billion and the vast majority of attacks on home networks involved brute forcing logins to gain control of a router or smart device.
Jon Clay, Director of Global Threat Communications for Trend Micro, said in a statement, “In 2020, businesses faced unprecedented threat volumes hitting their extended infrastructure, including the networks of home workers”.
“Familiar tactics such as phishing, brute forcing and vulnerability exploitation are still favoured as the primary means of compromise, which should help when developing defences”.
There was an increase of 34 per cent in newly detected ransom ware families, with “double extortion” attacks, as attackers steal data before encrypting it to force payment by threatening to release the stolen information. More targeted cyber threats are becoming increasingly popular.
The report said the most targeted sectors were government, banking, manufacturing and healthcare.
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