Trend Micro (TYO: 4704;TSE: 4704), a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, releases its H1 2019 report and reveals an increase in fileless attacks designed to disguise malicious activity. Detections of this threat alone grew by 265% compared to the first half of 2018.
The findings so far confirm many of the predictions made by Trend Micro last year. Attackers are working smarter to target companies and environments that will yield the greatest return on investment.
"The cybersecurity game today is based on sophistication and stealth as corporate technology and criminal attacks become more connected and intelligent," said Jon Clay, global director of threat communications at Trend Micro. “From attackers, we've seen intentional, targeted, and ingenious attacks that stealthily take advantage of people, processes, and technologies. But on the business side, digital transformation and cloud migration are expanding and evolving the enterprise attack surface. evolution, companies need a technology partner that can combine human expertise with advanced security technologies to better detect, correlate, respond and remediate threats."
In addition to the increase in fileless attacks, attackers are increasingly utilizing threats that are not visible to traditional security filters, as they can run in a system's memory, reside in the registry, or abuse legitimate tools. Exploit kits are also back, with an increase of 136% compared to the same period in 2018.
Cryptomining malware continued to be the most detected threat in the first half of 2019, with attackers increasingly utilizing these threats in server and cloud environments. Realizing another prediction, the number of routers involved in potential inbound attacks jumped 64% over the first half of 2018, with more Mirai malware variants looking for exposed devices.
Additionally, digital extortion schemes have skyrocketed by 319% as of the second half of 2018, which is in line with previous predictions. Enterprise Email Compromise (BEC) remains a major threat, with a 52% increase in detections compared to the last six months. Ransomware-related files, emails and URLS also grew by 77% over the same period.
Altogether, Trend Micro blocked more than 26.8 billion threats in the first half of 2019, more than 6 billion more than the same period last year, and 91% of them entered the corporate network via email. Mitigating these advanced threats requires intelligent defense-in-depth that can correlate data across gateways, networks, servers and endpoints to better identify and stop attacks.
To read the full Evasive Threats report, Pervasive Effects: 2019 Midyear Security Roundup, visit their website: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/research-and-analysis/threat-reports/evasive-threats-pervasive-effects.
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