New threat landscape report highlights cyber risk trends
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- Published: Friday, 21 February 2020 08:16
Imperva, Inc., has published its latest Cyber Threat Index, a monthly report and measurement of the global threat landscape based on data from Imperva sensors across the globe. The report reveals sharp increases in high-risk vulnerabilities and public cloud-based attacks on organizations.
Key findings from the Cyber Threat Index include:
A sharp increase (57 percent) in high-risk vulnerabilities drove the Index up 8 percent from December 2019 to January 2020. Following the release of Oracle’s Critical Patch Update—which included 19 MySQL vulnerabilities—there was an unusual increase in the vulnerabilities risk component within the Index. Specifically, there was a 57 percent increase in vulnerabilities that can be accessed remotely with no authentication required, have a public exploit available, or are trending in social media, meaning they pose an especially high level of risk to businesses.
Web attacks originating from the public cloud saw a 16 percent spike from November to December 2019. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the top source of attacks, responsible for 94 percent of all web attacks coming from public clouds. This suggests that public cloud companies should be auditing malicious behaviour on their platforms.
Bots used the Coronavirus hype for spamming. In the same month that the Coronavirus outbreak first came to light, Imperva observed two new spam campaigns that relied on the hype around Coronavirus. These messages lure people to enter a site that tracks the spread of the virus and also offers the sale of shady pharmaceuticals.
Latest Citrix bug gained more press than hacker interest. Despite widespread concern over the recent Citrix Application Delivery Controller bug, it was only ranked as the 176th most frequent attack vector seen this month. For comparison, high-profile attack vectors such as this typically rank among the top 20. The Citrix bug accounted for 200,000 attacks detected on the Imperva network, while the top attack vector in January accounted for over two billion attacks.
Most attacks target sources within the same country. Most of the top 10 countries in which attacks originated were targeting sites within the same country. The exceptions were attackers from Germany and China who targeted US-based websites. This can be attributed in part to the fact that many websites under attack from different regions are located in US data centres / centers. This finding shows that even cyber-attacks conducted by foreign adversaries often appear to originate locally.
