Worldwide cyberattacks continue to rise, but India bucks the trend

SonicWall today announced the release of the 2019 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report that delivers an in-depth look at threat intelligence obtained from its more than 1 million sensors from around the world. The Report reveals that Ransomware attacks were up in every geography except India, which saw a 49 per cent reduction, and the U.K. However, India still has a major uphill task in combating malware where attacks rose by 53% in 2018.

Analyzed by the SonicWall Capture Labs, an elite team of threat researchers, threat data collected over the course of 2018 indicates an escalation in the volume of cyber attacks and new, targeted threat tactics used by cybercriminals.

SonicWall analyzed 3.9 trillion events in over 215 countries. The annual report is a result of SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers analyzing data from over 200,000 malicious events and malware samples daily to compare and document online criminal activity.

According to Debasish Mukherjee, Country Director, SonicWall India & SAARC “India is one of the fastest digitizing countries in the world today. SonicWall is here to partner Indian businesses as they build secure enterprises with solutions that focus on prevention rather than being remedial. With machine learning maturing for example, never seen before malware can be detected early on and advanced cybersecurity solutions can mitigate the threats. It is also encouraging to see the growing adoption of enterprise security solutions by the SME sector.”

Few salient features of the Cyber Threat Report are:

• 10.52 billion malware attacks were blocked in 2018, the most ever recorded to date by SonicWall
• 217.5 per cent increase in IoT attacks in 2018
• More than 2.8 million encrypted malware attacks were blocked in 2018, a 27 per cent year-over-year increase from 2017
• 11 per cent year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks
• 56 per cent increase in web app attacks
• 3.9 trillion intrusion attempts

In the wake of vulnerabilities like Spoiler, PortSmash, Foreshadow, Meltdown and Spectre that can lead to side-channel attacks, SonicWall threat researchers have deemed processor vulnerabilities a growing security concern for both software and hardware technologies, which could have unprecedented ramifications. SonicWall’s patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection™ (RTDMI) identified 74,290 never-seen-before attacks in 2019. These variants were so new, unique and complex that they were without a signature at the time of discovery and included detection of multiple side-channel attacks. 

As network defences increase in sophistication, so do the anonymity of attacks that now include the targeting of non-standard ports to ensure payloads are concealed upon delivery. Based upon a sampling of more than 700 million malware attacks, SonicWall research revealed that 19.2 per cent of malware attacks used non-standard ports, a year-over-year increase of 8.7 per cent.

PDFs and Office files have long since been an everyday operating tool for organizations of all sizes and across all industries. Cybercriminals are now leveraging these trusted files to circumvent traditional firewalls and single-engine sandboxes to deliver malware. SonicWall’s multi-engine sandbox service discovered threats in over 47,000 PDFs and almost 51,000 Office files in 2018. This presents a growing problem, as most security controls cannot identify and mitigate the hidden malware contained in the files.