The threat of novel malware is growing exponentially, making it more difficult for security solutions to identify attachments and links to files as being malware.
According to BlackBerry’s new Global Threat Intelligence Report, the problem of novel malware has been continually growing over the last year.
At the beginning of last year, BlackBerry was detecting new malware at a rate of just one per minute. By the next month, it was 1.5, 2.9 pieces per minute by August of last year. By Q4 of last year, it rose to 3.7 pieces per minute.
That’s a staggering jump in a single year, and even ransomware hasn’t rose that quickly. The likely culprit is the affiliate cybercrime models that have arisen; with one “vendor” producing malware that may be used by hundreds or thousands of would-be threat actors, a viable way to make malware look unique for each one becomes a marketable “feature.”
According to BlackBerry, despite critical infrastructure organizations being attacked the most (they represented 64% of all attacked stopped), 53% of attacks targeted the commercial enterprise sector (which BlackBerry sees as the culmination of retail, capital goods, wholesale trade and other related industries) used unique malware last year.
This problem of malware being unique won’t necessarily stop security solutions from detecting it early. But since we’ve already covered here how one in eight email threats make it past security solutions, it stands to reason this may become a larger problem, with the organization needing to rely on the user to spot and stop the attack based purely on the social engineering cues in an email — something taught in new-school security awareness training.
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