The number of cyber attacks worldwide has quadrupled in the second half of 2018 compared to the first half of that year. In Belgium, nearly 15 percent of companies were hit by five or more cyber attacks last year. That’s what figures from F-Secure show.
The Finnish cybersecurity specialist, with its global network of decoy servers, detected 32 percent more attacks than in 2017. In addition, F-Secure claims to have detected as many as fifteen cyber-attacks in a month at a company with 1,300 endpoints. And in the same period of time at another company with 325 endpoints, it encountered seven cyber attacks.
Detection
At the same time, 22 percent of those surveyed said in a survey of 3,350 ICT decision-makers that they had not detected a single cyber attack in the past year. Another 20 percent detected only one attack in the same period and 31 percent detected two to five attacks. According to F-Secure, only a third of respondents use a detection and incident response solution or service.
Today’s cyber-attacks look completely different from those of five or ten years ago. Preventive measures and strategies no longer stop everything. There is no doubt in my mind that many of the companies surveyed do not have a complete picture of what is happening in their security field. Many organizations only start to appreciate the value of cyber security after a cyber threat has put them at high cost. So it doesn’t really surprise me that there are companies that don’t detect any attacks in one year, says Leszek Tasiemski, vice president cyber security products research & development at F-Secure.
IoT
In addition, the cybersecurity specialist points to the increasing number of hacked IoT devices (Internet of Things). F-Secure sees this clearly in the fact that the most frequently attacked TCP port is related to Telnet. In this way, new vulnerable devices would be searched for. The survey also shows that companies in the financial and ICT sectors are facing the highest number of cyber-attacks. Healthcare institutions and manufacturing companies detected the fewest attacks.
In addition, the web server Nginx was the most commonly used source of cyber attacks and IP addresses were the main source and destination of attack traffic in the US. Russia ranks second in terms of the main source of attack traffic, followed by Italy. As far as the most important source of local traffic is concerned, Canada ranks second and the Czech Republic third.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.