Evolving Cybersecurity Threats Highlight Increased Risks for Organizations and Governments
The cybersecurity threat landscape is constantly evolving as new threat actors, technologies, and threats emerge, creating an uncertain environment for organizations and the public, where even opening an email can pose risks.
Cybersecurity professionals must remain vigilant and stay ahead of rapidly evolving schemes and strategies employed by cybercriminals, who are increasingly sophisticated and often leverage open-source technologies.
According to the Kaspersky Incident Response Analyst Report 2023, 75 percent of recent cyberattack attempts exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office. Among infection vectors, 42.3 percent of successful attacks used publicly available applications, 20.3 percent involved compromised accounts, and 8.5 percent relied on brute force credential attacks.
The report also highlights that most successful incursions involved attackers using stolen or purchased credentials before launching remote desktop protocol (RDP) attacks, phishing emails loaded with malicious attachments or links, and malicious files on public resources disguised as document templates. On a positive note, the report shows a 36 percent drop in attack attempts in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022.
In the aftermath of a cyberattack, 33.3 percent of affected organizations had their data encrypted, 21.1 percent experienced data theft, and 12.2 percent encountered compromised active directories.
A prior Kaspersky survey conducted in 2022 identified the most significant cyberthreat risks as ransomware (66 percent) and data theft (66 percent), followed by cybersabotage (62 percent), supply chain attacks (60 percent), DDoS attacks (60 percent), cyberespionage (59 percent), advanced persistent threats (57 percent), and cryptomining (56 percent). For 2024, the currently trending cyberthreats are primarily supply chain attacks (6.8 percent) and targeted phishing attempts (5.1 percent), both posing clear and present dangers for businesses.
The 2023 statistics also revealed that governments were the most frequent targets for threat actors (27.9 percent), followed by the manufacturing sector (17 percent), financial institutions (12.2 percent), and IT companies (8.8 percent).
In terms of targeted regions, Asia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) experienced the highest number of cybersecurity incidents (47.3 percent), followed by the Americas (21.8 percent), the Middle East (10.9 percent), and Europe (9.1 percent).
“Governments were the most prolific targets for threat actors, followed distantly by manufacturing and financial institutions, with the largest cyberthreat risks being ransomware and cybersabotage,” said Igor Kuznetsov, Director of the Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team.
