That figure is about 265 percent higher than the number of threats it detected in the same period in 2018, which was over 6 billion, and about 18 percent more than the overall files events detected in the entire 2018. “From attackers, we saw intentional, targeted, and crafty attacks that stealthily take advantage of people, processes, and technology.”
“However, on the business side, digital transformation and cloud migrations are expanding and evolving the corporate attack surface. To navigate this evolution, businesses need a technology partner that can combine human expertise with advanced security technologies to better detect, correlate, respond to, and remediated threats,” Felipe added.
Threats that breach traditional filters
Another highlight of the findings of the mid-year report is the massive growth in the volume of threats that are not usually visible to the traditional security filters deployed by the IT systems within organizations. So-called exploit kits, which have declined in the past year, re-emerged with a 136 percent-jump year-on-year.
Cryptocurrency mining (crypto mining or crypto-jacking) malware was still the most detected threat in the period as attackers rampantly deploy such attacks on servers and even in cloud environments. The number of routers that are being used to facilitate possible inbound attacks increased by 64 percent, as more Mirai variants search for exposed devices.
Digital extortion or ransomware incidences jumped by 319 percent in the same period. Detections of business email compromise (BEC) scams rose by 52 percent (with businesses in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia getting more exposure), while other ransomware-related files, emails, and URLs increased by 77 percent in the six-month period.
Cyberthreats in the Philippines
In the Philippines, among the top threats detected based on the data gathered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network for the first half of 2019 are ransomware, Trojan downloaded’s, and file infectors.
Security TRENDs 2019
These and more findings of the report were the center of discussions in the recent Security TRENDs 2019, an industry conference organized by Trend Micro Philippines last September 3, 2019, at the Manila Shangri-La in Makati City.
