New insight into the state of attacks and threats suggest that cybercriminals are growing in number, sophistication and successes, while victims just sit back seemingly helpless.
It’s never a good thing when one reads a report and nearly every stat points to cybercriminals getting better at their craft. But that’s exactly what can be seen in security vendor CrowdStrike’s 2022 Global Threat Report. According to the report, there is growth across the board:
- The number of tracked cybercriminal groups has increased by 170 percent
- Data leaks have become ubiquitous with ransomware attacks
- The time it takes to break out from an initially-compromised endpoint to the rest of a victim’s network is one hour and 32 minutes
- Interactive intrusions (those with a live threat actor involved) increased 45 percent
What all this data points to is that threat actors and the cybercriminal groups they belong to are honing their craft much faster than security vendors are improving their product. This doesn’t mean one should give up; but it does mean one needs to get smarter with their cybersecurity strategy to specifically stop threat actions using a layered approach that logically addresses each part of an attack.
One of the most commonly neglected parts of an attack is the phishing emails that make their way to the Inbox. Should a malicious email find itself in an Inbox, the only remaining layer of defense is the vigilant user who has undergone Security Awareness Training and knows how to identify the malicious link or attachment. By doing so, the user does not enable the attack to continue and stops the attack in its tracks.
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