New data has found that the number of global weekly cyberattacks has reached the highest record to date. The data has shown that there were 925 attempts per organization in Q4 2021. The data also revealed that the number of attempted attacks has been on a steady increase since Q2 2020, having seen 50% more attacks per week on corporate networks in 2021 in comparison to 2020.
The data from CheckPoint was gathered from millions of global sensors across endpoints, mobiles, and networks, collecting valuable data from a number of industries. For instance, the findings showed that both the research and education sector witnessed the highest amount of attacks in 2021, with an average of 1605 attacks every week, per organization. This was a 75% increase compared to 2020. Military and government attacks followed closely, with 1136 attacks, while the communications sector experience 1079 in 2021.
George Papamargaritis, MSS Director, Obrela Security Industries said, “it is no surprise that we have continued to see a rise in cyber-attacks throughout 2021. Cybercriminals have used the pandemic to prey on victims when they are most vulnerable, and unfortunately, many businesses were unprepared for the uncertainty brought about by the global pandemic. What this data does show is that organisations today must stop seeing cyber attacks simply as a technical nuisance when they are much more than that. They are a reality.”
Peter Draper, director of EMEA, Gurucul said, “it is interesting that the Education and Research sector has been hit hardest, probably skewed due to COVID and attacks trying to gather information regarding treatments and vaccinations. We have also seen a dramatic shift in the attackers who are now targeting individuals to great effect, not just enterprises. Attackers are starting to find greater success in these low-level attacks, such as targetting employees who may not follow the correct protocol with private or corporately sensitive information. Cyber security teams need to be looking at new ways of working, as the old ways are obviously not working well.”
Hank Schless, senior manager of security solutions at Lookout, commented that “the sudden implementation of new tools or expansion of existing ones just to keep operations going was an issue that every industry faced in early 2020. Suddenly, the IT and Security teams lost a handle on the visibility into how users and devices were accessing data and the cloud or private apps that it’s stored in.” He went on to say, “what’s more is that managing the security of each app or platform one at a time is a massive resource burn. Having the ability to implement uniform security policies across every resource from any device is critically important, and leveraging a unified security platform that combines cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA), and mobile threat detection (MTD) is the best way to solve this issue. ”
