FireEye released its yearly Advanced Threat Report, and they did some interesting math. Enterprises are hit by cyber attacks on average once every 1.5 seconds, which is double from the year before, which was once every three seconds for an attack of some kind.
In the first six months, Java was the most common attack vector for hackers, but FireEye observed a surge in watering hole attacks using IE zero-days in the second half of the year.
Cybercrime also expanded globally, as FireEye found malware attack servers and Command & Control machines in 206 countries, up from 184 the year before. The U.S., Germany, South Korea, China, the Netherlands, the U.K. and Russia were home to the most C&C servers.
"The increasing frequency at which cyber attacks are happening illustrates the allure of malware to those with malicious intentions,” FireEye senior global threat analyst Dr. Kenneth Geers said in a statement. "Across the board, we are seeing a global expansion of APTs, malware, C&C infrastructure, and the use of publicly available tools to facilitate the attack process. The global scale of the threat has put cyber defenders in the very difficult position of not having any clue where the next attack will come from."
The Top 10 countries that were most frequently hits by APTs in 2013 were the U.S., South Korea, Canada, Japan, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Download the report at FireEye (registration required)
