Detected Cyber Threats Rose 20% to Exceed 62.6 Billion in 2020

The report also shows that home networks were a major draw last year for
cybercriminals looking to pivot to corporate systems, or compromise and conscript
IoT devices into botnets. Trend Micro found attacks on homes surged 210% to
reach nearly 2.9 billion–amounting to 15.5% of all homes. The vast majority
(73%) of attacks on home networks involved brute forcing logins to gain control
of a router or smart device.

Email-borne threats made up
91% of the 62.6 billion threats blocked by Trend Micro last year, indicating
that phishing attacks continued to be hugely popular. The company detected
nearly 14 million unique phishing URLs in 2020 as attackers targeted distracted
home workers.

“In 2020, businesses faced
unprecedented threat volumes hitting their extended infrastructure, including
the networks of home workers. Familiar tactics such as phishing, brute forcing
and vulnerability exploitation are still favored as the primary means of
compromise, which should help when developing defenses,” said Tony
Lee, Head of Consulting of
Trend Micro Hong Kong and Macau. “Global organizations have now had time to
understand the operational and cyber risk impact of the pandemic. The new year
is a chance to adjust and improve with comprehensive cloud-based security to
protect distributed staff and systems.”

Other key trends included:

• Newly
  detected ransomware families increased 34%, with “double extortion” attacks –
  where attackers steal data before encrypting it to force payment by threatening
  to release the stolen information — and more targeted threats becoming
  increasingly popular. Government, banking, manufacturing and healthcare were
  the most targeted sectors.
• The
  number of vulnerabilities published by the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) increased
  40% year-on-year, but Trend Micro continues to see flaws from as far back as
  2005 being heavily exploited.
• Many
  attacks targeted flaws in VPNs used by remote workers. CVE-2019-11510, a
  critical arbitrary file disclosure flaw in Pulse Connect Secure, already has
  nearly 800,000 hits based on Trend Micro customer data.
• Cloud
  service misconfigurations increasingly had consequences in 2020. Trend Micro
  observed exploitation of unsecured APIs in several cryptocurrency mining
  attacks.
• The
  ZDI published 1,453 vulnerability advisories, nearly 80% of which were rated as
  Critical or High severity.
• On
  the positive front, there was a 17% fall in detections
  of BEC attacks, although there’s no indication of how many were successful.