Fortinet announced the findings of its latest Global Threat Landscape Report. The research reveals that globally, as well as in Asia Pacific, poor cybersecurity hygiene and risky application usage enables destructive worm-like attacks to take advantage of hot exploits at record speed. Adversaries are spending less time developing ways to break in, and instead are focusing on leveraging automated and intent-based tools to infiltrate with more impact to business continuity. For a detailed view of the findings and some important takeaways for CISOs read our blog. Research highlights are as follows:
Crime-as-a-Service infrastructure and autonomous attack tools enable adversaries to easily operate on a global scale. Threats like WannaCry were remarkable for how fast they spread and for their ability to target a wide range of industries. Yet, they could have been largely prevented if more organizations practiced consistent cyber hygiene. Unfortunately, adversaries are still seeing a lot of success in using hot exploits for their attacks that have not been patched or updated. To complicate matters more, once a particular threat is automated, attackers are no longer limited to targeting specific industries, therefore, their impact and leverage only increases over time.
Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet, said, “The technology innovation that powers our digital economy creates opportunity for good and bad in cybersecurity. Yet, something we don’t talk about often enough is the opportunity everyone has to limit bad consequences by employing consistent and effective cybersecurity hygiene. Cybercriminals aren’t breaking into systems using new zero day attacks, they are primarily exploiting already discovered vulnerabilities. This means they can spend more of their resources on technical innovations making their exploits difficult to detect. Newer worm-like capabilities spread infections at a rapid pace and can scale more easily across platforms or vectors. Intent-based security approaches that leverage the power of automation and integration are critical to combat this new ‘normal’.”
