Organizations Beware! Cyberattacks are Becoming More Prevalent, Hitting More Device OSes, and are Shifting Focus to You

The latest data from Malwarebyte’s annual State of Malware Report shows increases almost across the board, showing that the bad guys are stepping on the gas into 2020.

The last thing any organization wants to hear is 1) there are more attacks this year than last and 2) they’re focusing the attacks more on you. But, this is exactly the message being sent by the latest numbers in the Malwarebytes report. According to the report, the number of attacks is on the rise, and the focus is clearly shifting from consumer to business as potential victims.

Some of the more eye-opening stats include:

• Ryuk ransomware detections increased by 543 percent over Q4 2018
• Detections of Sodinokibi ransomware have increased by 820 percent
• Business detections of threats on Windows increased by 13 percent from 2018 to 2019
• Mac threat detections increased 129 percent
• Familiar malware variants like Trickbot and Emotet are all on the rise as well

This is all bad news. It appears that the bad guys are turning up the heat, increasing their attacks on businesses and are expanding to include every and, potentially, any operating system that can be of use to give the cybercriminal an advantage.

Nearly every stat I mentioned ties back to the use of phishing attacks to trick users into engaging with malicious content. Security Awareness Training is a needed tool for organizations to counteract the assumed unwitting participation users will have when socially engineered. By being educated on the various types of phishing attacks, it matters less what kind of malware is being used or which OS is the target; in every case, the user now has a reasonable chance of stopping an attack in its tracks.