7 Key Stats that Size Up the Cybercrime Deluge
Updated data on zero-days, IoT threats, cryptomining, and economic costs should keep eyebrows raised in 2018.
February 26, 2018
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Now that we've got a couple of months from this year in the rearview mirror, security researchers have had enough time to crunch the numbers from 2017. That means a raft of new reports analyzing last year's cybersecurity data with updated telemetry on the threat landscape, economic impact, and defense problems facing the cybersecurity industry.
Here are some of the most illuminating highlights.
From 2016 to 2017 the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities per year shot up by just about 31%, according to the 2017 Vulnerability Trends report from Risk Based Security. That's a marked increase after only moderate rises in discovered flaws the prior three years.
From the report: "This means that organizations must not only remain vigilant in patching, but they must pursue their vendors to ensure that security devices are capable of detecting these vulnerabilities. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and vulnerability scanners that are only looking for a fraction of these vulnerabilities will not properly protect your network."
Zero-day vulnerabilities saw a particularly steep rise in 2017. According to Trend Micro's 2017 Annual Security Roundup, they nearly doubled. In particular, SCADA-related zero-days saw serious traction, rising 146%.
From the report: "The past year demonstrated how threat actors are constantly on the prowl for weaknesses in systems and devices, as these serve as gateways to potentially lucrative exploits. Cybercriminals actively look for flaws to take advantage of in order to gain access and escalate privileges in systems, as well as to conduct denial-of-service attacks. These system and device vulnerabilities leave enterprises especially exposed to potential breaches and ripe for profiteering."
While ransomware threats still remain a considerable threat, Trend Micro reports that the overall growth in this category finally reached a plateau midyear last year. Interestingly, as this type of attack is deprecated and commoditized on the black market, the number of families continues to diversify. So overall threats went down, but the variety of them went up. Amid all this noise, the WannaCry variant dominated the landscape - making up 57% of all ransomware detected last year.
From the report: "This leaner number delivered a remarkable twist: A few of these major ransomware players were responsible for big, complex security threats, as evidenced by the highly disruptive WannaCry and Petya. Affecting victims on a global scale, these major ransomware families resulted in an estimated US$5 billion in losses."
Even as the prevalence of ransomware has gone down, attackers have latched onto the new hotness in cybercriminal moneymaking: cryptomining. Trend Micro noted that last fall coin mining-based malware detections surpassed WannaCry ransomware activity. Meanwhile, Imperva researchers put a finer point on the issue with an eye-raising stat. Almost 90% of the malicious payloads they detected in remote code-execution attacks in December were cryptomining malware. The bad guys have been scrambling to repurpose existing infrastructure to take advantage of the cryptocurrency bubble. Imperva's report explained that these remote code-execution attacks are the kind usually used for building up DDoS botnets. The crooks are just shifting their muscle to mining.
From the report: "This kind of malware allows attackers to use the CPU (or sometimes GPU) power of the vulnerable server to mine crypto currencies. In this kind of attack, the attackers eliminate the need to sell their product to a third party and thus achieve a faster return on investment."
Source: Imperva Research
IoT Exploit Volume Associated with Reaper Botnet
It Took 4 Days for 1 IoT Botnet to Increase 53 Timex
According to researchers with Fortinet - and elsewhere - IoT botnets are on the significant uptick. One example of this is the rise in Reaper, a variant evolved from Mirai that was able to boost its volume over the course of four days last October from 50,000 to 2.7 million nodes.
From the report: "If anything takes home the prize for the Q4 exploit-a-thon, it would have to be IoT-based attacks. Reaper is also especially concerning because it is built around a Lua engine combined with additional Lua scripts in order to run its attacks. Lua is an embedded programming language designed to enable scripts to run. So, even though the current Reaper threats we have seen to date appear to be benign, its flexible Lua-based framework means its code can be easily updated to include more malicious attack options."
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and McAfee just teamed up to try to peg a number that shows just how much cybercrime is costing the global economy. Accounting for intellectual property losses, online fraud and financial crimes, financial manipulation, opportunity costs, post-breach mitigation, cyber insurance, and reputational damage, the overall estimate adds up to as much as $600 billion. That's a $150 billion increase over 2014, which was the last time CSIS drew up similar estimates.
From the report: "The cost of cybercrime is unevenly distributed among all the countries of the world. CSIS found variations by region, income levels and level of cybersecurity maturity. Unsurprisingly, the richer the country, the greater its loss to cybercrime is likely to be."
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and McAfee just teamed up to try to peg a number that shows just how much cybercrime is costing the global economy. Accounting for intellectual property losses, online fraud and financial crimes, financial manipulation, opportunity costs, post-breach mitigation, cyber insurance, and reputational damage, the overall estimate adds up to as much as $600 billion. That's a $150 billion increase over 2014, which was the last time CSIS drew up similar estimates.
From the report: "The cost of cybercrime is unevenly distributed among all the countries of the world. CSIS found variations by region, income levels and level of cybersecurity maturity. Unsurprisingly, the richer the country, the greater its loss to cybercrime is likely to be."
Now that we've got a couple of months from this year in the rearview mirror, security researchers have had enough time to crunch the numbers from 2017. That means a raft of new reports analyzing last year's cybersecurity data with updated telemetry on the threat landscape, economic impact, and defense problems facing the cybersecurity industry.
Here are some of the most illuminating highlights.
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