In the recent Sonicwall Mid-year threat report, It was shown that there has been a massive increase in Malware. It was suggested that this is due to the increase of people returning to the office after the pandemic. I can see where this is coming from as a high level of Hacking and Malware attacks can happen on Open networks at Offices, Universities or Coffee Shops. This is why having a VPN installed on your device is a great idea.
Luckily the report found that there has indeed been a decrease in Ransomware attacks, while this is good news, we are still very high when compared to the Pre-Pandemic numbers, A key factor in the decrease of ransomware is simply that a lot of people are becoming aware of these types of cyber-crimes and therefore are putting actions in place to prevent attacks or they are also educating themselves on how to identify a malicious email or text. For Cyber Month, we are constantly spreading awareness about ransomware and other types of cyber attacks on our social media, and giving pieces of advice on how to prevent cyber attacks. An interesting segment in the report showed that Government and Education industries are still the highest targeted, this is largely due to the weakness in Open networks as stated previously.
A big type of cyber attack that skyrocketed this year was Cyber-jacking. This is when your computer is hijacked and an application is installed to mine cryptocurrency using your hardware. Just like with Ransomware bot Government and Education industries are the main target here, but this makes sense as these computers would be running all day , every day, with a full internet connection.
In Conclusion, there were many interesting things in the report, it’s nice being able to see all of these analytics in one document with a nice presentation as well. The inclusion of graphs, charts and high quality images, always improves the reception of reports like this. It will be interesting to see the end of the year report that will become available and compare some of the statistics to this report.