Cyber-attacks continued to haunt the businesses of throughout 2016, inflicting massive reputational and revenue damage on them.
We’ve made up a list of last year’s cybersecurity threats the enterprises faced last year that will help you to evaluate your risk, determine areas of vulnerability and formulate your strategy for 2017.
Let’s have a look on these threats and key Statistics.
Growth of New Malware:
2016 saw a massive surge in new malware attacks, with an average of 200,000 attacks taking place each day. Just the third quarter of the year, 18 million samples of the attack were captured.
Malware continues to grow and evolves to bypass your antivirus and other levels of protection, making it difficult for your IT team, your company, and your vendors, to keep up.
Rise of Ransomware:
A report released by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in June 2016 revealed that more than 4,000 ransomware attacks occurred on average each day. It was an increase of 300% over the preceding year when around 1,000 ransomware attacks were recorded per day.
Phishing Emails and Over-Confident People:
Phishing emails also saw a massive rise in 2016, having been used as an attack vector for ransomware.
According to a report by PhishMe released in February, ransomware rose to 97.25 percent during the third quarter from 92% in Q1.
Even a more shocking than these statistics is that majority of the users are overconfident about the phishing attacks.
Zinaida Benenson from Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany conducted two studies about the mock phishing attacks in the varsity and the results revealed that everyone in two users clicks on links from unknown senders.
in a questionnaire provided to the participants, 78 percent of the people said that they were aware of the risks of unknown links. In the first group tested with a mock phishing email, 20% of people said they clicked the link in the email but 45% actually clicked. In the second group tested, 16% of people said they clicked the link in the email but 25% actually clicked.
In both cases, a higher percentage of users actually clicked than the percentage who admitted that they clicked.
Reluctance to Change:
A survey conducted by the Barkly about the Security Confidence Headed into 2017 revealed another shocking fact that around 52% of organizations that suffered cyber-attacks in 2016 haven’t made any change to their security this year.
According to the survey, lack of additional budget or decrease in the budget were the main factors behind businesses’ reluctance in improving their cybersecurity infrastructure.
