Targeted cyberattacks based on IP theft are being conducted against both the manufacturing industry and smaller businesses, which are likely to have less income to invest in shoring up their defenses against attack. Symantec says that SMBs — with fewer than 250 employees — now account for 31 percent of targeted attacks, and are often seen as a means to gain access to larger firms through “watering hole” techniques. The average number of targeted attacks has increased to an average of 116 per day, made popular by the Elderwood Gang which was able to infect 500 firms in 24 hours. An interesting point highlighted within the report is that 61 percent of malicious websites are actually legitimate; targeted by hackers who exploit vulnerabilities and create diversions or channels for malware to be installed on a victim’s PC. Business, technology and ecommerce websites are most likely to be affected due to unpatched website vulnerabilities, and once malware has been downloaded, ransomware is a popular choice for hackers to get their money’s worth — especially when they buy legitimate advertising space to hide their code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Simply put, a “watering hole” attack uses a trusted website as a base to divert visitors to an unsafe, malicious website, where malware can then take advantage of vulnerabilities within a PC system to steal data.<\/p>\n
The report suggests that industrial espionage is on the rise, and manufacturing is now the most attractive target for those looking to steal valuable data, accounting for 24 percent of targeted attacks.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As social media spam rises, traditional spam has declined slightly from 75 percent of all email sent in 2011 to 69 percent last year — although 30 billion are still sent every day.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“This year’s ISTR shows that cybercriminals aren’t slowing down, and they continue to devise new ways to steal information from organizations of all sizes,” said Stephen Trilling, chief technology officer of Symantec.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Link: http:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/symantec-industrial-espionage-on-the-rise-smbs-a-target-7000014061\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4761,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions\/4761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}