According to a new global threat intelligence report by NTT Security 77% of all detected ransomware from October 1, 2015 to Sept. 31, 2016 attacks occurred in four business sectors. Professional services had 28%, government had 19%, healthcare was at 15%, and retail came in at 15% as well.
The report highlighted not only ransomware, but also phishing and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks too. These are the type of attacks that are most common in today’s world as threats to businesses.
While the numbers for ransomware are certainly interesting another key point to note is that phishing attacks were responsible for 73% of all malware delivered to organizations. In case you forgot phishing is where a hacker uses a fake email to appear like a reputable business in order to steal information. Phishing has become such a threat to businesses you may have seen things like what SWK offers for security awareness training for employees (the color insert we’ve had the past couple months), because no matter how secure your network is if an employee’s information gets stolen a hacker can find their way in.
DDoS attacks like the one where hackers used internet connected devices to shut down parts of the internet not that long ago only represented about 6% of attacks globally.
Some other interesting facts that were uncovered in the report:
- When broken down into more specific industries finance, government, and manufacturing were the top three most commonly attacked.
- Only 32% of the organizations had an incident response plan (which sadly was up from 23% in previous years)
- Over half the incidents that occurred in the finance industry were related to malware
- Half of incidents in the healthcare industry were related to ransomware
