Few illicit activities have shown as much evolution and growth as cybercrime. According to information published by Atlas VPN, malicious hackers around the world have made more than 22 million attempts to attack business organizations over the past seven days; more than 60% of these attacks are related to malware infections.
Malware infections regularly have to do with activities such as theft of sensitive information or blocking files and systems to demand a ransom in exchange for restoring affected resources (ransomware attack). Other common attack variants are phishing campaigns and Command & Control (C&C) attacks.
To develop this analysis, Atlas VPN used data collected by Akami, a cybersecurity company that provides real-time information about cyberattacks against corporate customers.
According to this analysis, every day of last week there was an average of 3.2 million cyberattacks. Most of these incidents occurred on April 15 (3.6 million attempts to attack). In addition, malware attacks were prevalent during this period.
Cybersecurity experts consider malware infections to be the most common attack variant because this is the easiest way to access the networks of a target company to extract or encrypt data. Last week there were more than 2 million malware attacks on average.
Phishing attacks and C&C attacks equal 11% and 26% of all attacks recorded over the past seven days, respectively.
CYBERATTACKS REGISTERED DURING THE LAST MONTH
The trend changes when analyzing the behavior of hackers during the most recent thirty days. For example, C&C attacks were the second most practiced attack variant during this period (equal to 22% of the total volume of attacks), while malware infections are the second most common attack of the last thirty days.
Finally, phishing campaigns are the third most widely used type of attack by hackers, with around 15 million attacks in the same time period. This represents more than 15% of the total volume of attacks.
It should be noted that Akami serves about 30% of the world’s Internet traffic, so the figures collected must be close to one-third of total cybersecurity incidents. From this fact, it is possible to estimate that the cyberattack attempts that occurred per month around the world should be close to 300 million.
We must not forget that millions of people will continue to work from home for the coming months, so the number of cyberattack attempts is sure to increase.
He is a cyber security and malware researcher. He studied Computer Science and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2006. He is actively working as an cyber security investigator. He also worked for different security companies. His everyday job includes researching about new cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in enterprise security implementation.