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In a recent report from SonicWall Capture Labs, ransomware cases have risen by 20% in the first half of 2020. A total of 121.2 million attacks were recorded, with 79.9 million in the US and 5.9 million in the UK.

The increase could partly be attributed to the current ‘work from home’ situation, which places many employees outside the safety of the companies’ firewalls. Since the onset of the lockdown, phishing activities have increased. The attacks were especially numerous in April when spammers took advantage of the coronavirus to commit cybercrimes.

The resurgence of cybercrime

Malware attacks overall dropped from 4.8 billion in 2019 to 3.2 billion in 2020, an overall decline of 24%. The report warned that hackers are now using underhand tactics that involve launching fewer attacks but with maximum damage potential.

According to the report, the most affected countries include China and South Korea. The US and UK were lucky to be narrowly out of the top ten.

SonicWall CEO, Bill Conner, said that cybercriminals often set traps using evolved methods to target vulnerable people.

A clear and present danger

Businesses are now highly exposed to cybercriminals because of remote working and exposed employees. That is why organizations must adopt modern security strategies and abandon the traditional approaches

Malicious Microsoft Office files have increased by a staggering 176% in 2020. A total of 70,184 incidents were recorded and included a new Excel malware variant.

WordPress Manager pointed reported that attacks on content management systems (CMS) rose by 60%. The managing director of WP Manager, Jason Correia, stated that they had received an increased 60% cases of malware removal requests besides a 30% increase in brute force attempts to hack into websites.

Tip: Cybercrime becomes more sophisticated: ‘we can’t continue like this.’