Research Demonstrates Highly Automated Cyber Defenses are Critical to Mitigate Pervasive “Cybercrime-as-a-Service” Attacks

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Fortinet a provider of high-performance cybersecurity solutions, today announced the findings of its latest Global Threat Landscape Report. The data spans the cybersecurity kill chain focusing on three central aspects of the landscape, including application exploits, malicious software, and botnets against the backdrop of important enterprise technology and industry sector trends. The research reveals that while more high profile attacks have dominated the headlines, the reality is that the majority of threats faced by most organizations are opportunistic in nature fueled by a pervasive Crime-as-a-Service infrastructure. For a detailed view of the findings and some important take-aways for CISOs read our blog. Three important research highlights follow: 

1) Attack Tools Never Forget and Are Always Ready for Service, Anywhere and Anytime 

Modern tools and Crime-as-a-Service infrastructures enable adversaries to operate on a global scale at light speed. As a result, the Internet seems not interested in geographic distances or boundaries because most threat trends appear more global than regional. Adversaries are always on the attack, looking for the element of surprise whenever possible on an international scale. 

Understanding exploit trends or how ransomware works and spreads, the better we can avoid the impact caused by the next WannaCry. The malicious ransomware and its variants achieved great scale with hundreds of organizations affected across the world at once. 

• Ransomware: Just under 10% of organizations detected activity associated with ransomware. On any given day, an average of 1.2% dealt with ransomware botnets running somewhere in their environment. The peak days of activity fell on weekends, with the hope of slipping traffic past weekend security operations staff. As the average traffic volume of various ransomware botnets increased, the average number of firms impacted by them rose as well.
• Exploit Trends: 80% of organizations reported high or critical-severity exploits against their systems. The majority of these targeted vulnerabilities were released in the last five years, but no shortage of attempts was made against premillennial CVEs. Exploit distribution was pretty consistent across geographical regions, likely because a huge proportion of exploit activity is fully automated via tools that methodically scan wide swaths of the Internet probing for opportunistic openings.

2) Hyperconvergence and IoT Are Accelerating the Spread of Malware 

As networks and users increasingly share information and resources, attacks are spreading rapidly across distributed geographic areas and a wide variety of industries. Studying malware can help provide views into the preparation and intrusion stages of these attacks. Although protecting against mobile malware is particularly challenging because devices are not shielded on the internal network, are frequently joining public networks, and often are not under corporate ownership or control. 

• Mobile Malware: The prevalence of mobile malware remained steady from Q4 2016 to Q1 2017, with about 20% of organizations detecting it. More Android malware families made the top 10 list by volume or prevalence this quarter. The overall ratio among all types of malware was 8.7% for Q1 comparing to Q4’s 1.7%.
• Regional Prevalence: Mobile malware prevalence rose in every region except the Middle East. The rate of growth was statistically significant in all cases rather than simply random variation. Compared to some other regional threat comparisons, Android malware appeared to have stronger geographic tendencies.

3) Visibility of Distributed and Elastic Infrastructure is Diminishing 

Threat trends reflect the environment in which they occur, therefore, understanding how information technologies, services, controls, and behaviors change over time is important. It can act as a window into broader security policies and governance models and is valuable to monitoring the evolution of exploits, malware, and botnets as networks become increasingly complex and distributed. 

Visibility and control over today’s infrastructures are diminishing as the number of potential attack vectors across the expanded network landscape continues to grow. The rush to adopt private and public cloud solutions, the growth of IoT, the variety and volume of smart devices connecting to the network, and out-of-band threat vectors like shadow IT have stretched security professionals past their limits. 

• Encrypted Traffic: The median ratio of HTTPS to HTTP traffic hit a high mark of nearly 55%. While helpful for maintaining privacy, this trend presents challenges to threat monitoring and detection. Many defensive tools have poor visibility into encrypted communications. Organizations—especially those with higher HTTPS ratios—could face threats lurking within encrypted communications.
• Applications: The median number of cloud applications used per organization was 62, which is roughly a third of all applications detected, with IaaS applications hitting a new high point. For many of these organizations, the challenge is that data visibility can drop significantly once it moves into the cloud. In addition, data stored in these applications and services continues to grow, instead of shrink therefore, this is a problematic trend.
• Industry Sectors: Cluster analysis by vertical industry shows that the attack surface across most industries was the same with a few exceptions such as the Education and Telco sectors. This means that adversaries can easily exploit similar attack surfaces across industries more easily, especially with automated tools.

In Asia Pacific, the exploit trends show similarities to global and other regions’ trends. For example, the top exploit detected in all regions are related to the 2014 Shellshock bug. And both globally and in APAC, the majority of malware infections are tied to ransomware droppers such as Nemucod. Lastly, the top botnet activity globally is related to Andromeda, and the same is observed in APAC. As highlighted earlier, the Internet is not bound by geographic distances and boundaries, so most threat trends appear more global than regional. 

Report Methodology 

The Fortinet Global Threat Landscape report is a quarterly view that represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs drawn from Fortinet’s vast array of network devices and sensors within production environments during Q1 2017. Research data covers global, regional, industry sector, and organizational perspectives. It also focuses on three central and complementary aspects of the threat landscape: application exploits, malicious software, and botnets. In addition, Fortinet publishes a free, subscription-based Threat Intelligence Brief that reviews the top malware, virus, and web-based threats discovered every week, along with links to that week’s most valuable Fortinet research.