Threat intelligence from Firebox appliances protecting small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and distributed enterprises around the world showed that total malware attacks are up by 33 percent, and that cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging Microsoft Office documents to deliver malicious payloads according to a new report by WatchGuard Technologies.
“After a full year of collecting and analyzing Firebox Feed data, we can clearly see that cybercriminals are continuing to leverage sophisticated, evasive attacks and resourceful malware delivery schemes to steal valuable data,” said Corey Nachreiner, chief technology officer at WatchGuard Technologies. “Although these criminal tactics may vary over time, we can be certain that this broad trend will persist, so the risks have never been greater for small and midsize organizations with less IT and security resources. We encourage businesses of all sizes to proactively mitigate these threats with layered security services, advanced malware protection, and employee education and training in security best practices.”
The full Internet Security Report features evaluations of the quarter’s most pervasive malware and network attacks, recommendations for useful defensive strategies in today’s threat landscape, and a detailed breakdown of “the Krack Attack” – one of the top information security issues in 2017.
Additionally, the report includes a new research project from the WatchGuard Threat Lab, which analyzes a database of more than 1 billion stolen password records to stress just how often users choose weak passwords and re-use credentials across multiple accounts. This quarter’s conclusions are based on anonymized Firebox Feed data from nearly 40,000 active WatchGuard Fireboxes worldwide, which blocked more than 30 million malware variants (783 per device) and 6.9 million network attacks (178 per device) in Q4 2017.
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