Fortinet announces findings of Threat Landscape Report
Fortinet has disclosed the findings of its latest Global Threat Landscape Report covering Q4 2016. The research reveals that 50% of malware exploits in India occurred in the last three months of 2016. With India moving towards a cashless digital economy, the last two weeks in December 2016 recorded a very high level of threat activity which interestingly was not observed globally. The most attacked industry was Banking & Finance which received 15 times more hits than the second-placed Information Technology industry.
Michael Joseph, Regional Director – System Engineering, India & SAARC, Fortinet, said, “The cybersecurity challenges facing organizations today are complex with a threat landscape that is rapidly evolving. Threats are intelligent, autonomous, and increasingly difficult to detect, with new ones emerging and old ones returning with enhanced capabilities. In addition, the accessibilty of threat creation tools and services combined with the reward potential is driving the growth of the global cybercrime market into tens of billions of US dollars. To protect themselves, CISOs need to ensure that the data and security elements across all of their environments and devices are integrated, automated, and able to share intelligence, across an organization, from IoT to the cloud.”
The research also reveals the methods and strategies cybercriminals employed in detail and demonstrates the potential future impact to the digital economy. The highlights are given below:
Considering infrastructure trends and how they relate to the threat landscape is important. Exploits, malware, and botnets do not happen in a vacuum and finding or preventing threats gets increasingly complicated as network infrastructure evolves. Data shows encrypted traffic using SSL stayed steady at about 50% and accounted for roughly half of overall web traffic traversing within an organization. HTTPS traffic usage is an important trend to monitor, because while it is good for privacy, it presents challenges to detecting threats that are able to hide in encrypted communications. Often SSL traffic goes uninspected because of the huge processing overhead required to open, inspect, and re-encrypt traffic, forcing teams to choose between protection and performance. In terms of total applications detected per organization, the number of cloud applications trended up at 63, which is roughly a third of all applications detected. This trend has significant implications for security since IT teams have less visibility into the data residing in cloud applications, how that data is being used, and who has access to it. Social media, streaming audio and video, and P2P applications did not trend up sharply.
IoT devices are sought-after commodities for cybercriminals around the world. Mobile malware becomes a larger problem than before. Though it accounted for only 1.7 per cent of the total malware volume, one in five organizations reporting malware encountered a mobile variant. Nearly all were on Android. Substantial regional differences were found in mobile malware attacks, with 36 per cent coming from African organizations, 23 per cent from Asia, and 16 per cent from North America, compared to only 8 per cent in Europe. This data has implications for the trusted devices on corporate networks today.
H-Worm and ZeroAccess had two of the highest prevalence and volume for botnet families in Asia-Pacific. Both give cybercriminals control of affected systems to siphon data or perform click fraud and bitcoin mining. The technology and government sectors faced the highest numbers of attempted attacks by these two families of botnets.
The Fortinet Global Threat Landscape report represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs during Q4 2016 with research data covering global, regional, sector, and organizational perspectives. It focusses on three central and complementary aspects of the threat landscape: application exploits, malicious software (malware) and botnets.
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