SonicWall today recently unveiled their 2024 SonicWall Mid-Year Cyber Threat Report, which found the number of overall attacks are rising again, after an 11 percent increase in 2023. The report details the evolving threat landscape, highlighting the persistent, relentless and escalating nature of cyber threats globally.
“As threat actors continue to add more efficient and sophisticated tactics, we knew the threat report had to evolve to suit our partners’ and customers’ needs,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bob VanKirk. “The report is current and includes timely trends and provides our partners, MSPs, MSSPs and customers with actionable intelligence. The report provides insight on a range of threats, including:
- Malware – Total global malware volume rose 30 percent in the first half of 2024, with a 92 percent increase in May alone.
- Ransomware – Ransomware is trending up with an increase of 15 percent in North America and 51 percent in Latin America.
- IoT Malware – IoT attacks rose by 107 percent, with affected devices averaging 52.8 hours under attack. Additionally, 15 percent of all malware now uses software packing as its main MITRE TTP.
SonicWall Partner and Fornida COO Steven Huang stated that, “Most cybersecurity breaches include some degree of human error. Ultimately, there are two ways to battle this; reducing opportunity and educating users. The fewer opportunities there are for an error, the less users will be tested. And the more knowledge they have, the less likely they are to make a mistake even when they face an opportunity to do so.”
SonicWall’s patented Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection technology identified a total of 78,923 never-before-seen malware variants in the first five months of 2024. The threat landscape remains complex, with over 500 strains of new variants discovered each day.
Additional findings include:
- At least 12.6 percent of an organization’s annual revenues were at risk to cyber threats.
- Sensors detected an average of10 attack hours per eight-hour workday.
- Encrypted threats have increased by 92 percent globally.
- 83 percent of SonicWall customer-received alerts were related to cloud apps and compromised credentials.
The full report can be found at www.sonicwall.com/threat-report.