Germany based Cyber Security firm ‘NTT Security’ published an Annual Global Threat Intelligence Report in 2016 which said that cyber attacks from China constituted for less than 3% of all attacks against businesses in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Thus, the said country was placed at the 9th position in the list of the most prominent attack source.
But early this year, when the security firm freshly published its latest report, it was revealed that attacks from China have surged to a point that 67% of attacks targeting the manufacturing sector of companies operating in EMEA stemmed from China.
The NTT’s 2018 Global Threat Intelligence Report has disclosed the fact after analyzing data from over 6.1 trillion logs and 150 million attacks available for analysis- based on a log, event, attack, incident and vulnerability data from its clients. The data includes info gathered from honeypots and sandboxes located in over 100 different countries.
NTT Emphasized that the Chinese cyber attacks on businesses related to finance during the said tenure (2016-17) were characterized by extensive use of spyware, keyloggers, and more so ever were application based attacks. Meanwhile, the highly competitive tech sector witnessed a 25% global average increase in attacks.
On the other hand, the gaming industry is said to have become a major global target for hackers, particularly those spreading ransomware. While the companies operating in EMEA region were targeted by botnet client activity.
The Netherlands based company having 1500 security experts came to a conclusion that ransomware attacks have skyrocketed in the past year by 350%. As Finance, manufacturing, gaming and gambling sectors stood out as prime targets to those spreading ransomware.
Specifically mentioning some details in the report about data encrypting ransomware, NTT researchers have confirmed that only two types of ransomware- Locky with 45% and WannaCry, 30% dominated the charts of top ransomware variants in 2017.
On a concluding note, NTT researchers have warned that crypto mining software will hit most of the businesses operating in EMEA region in 2018 as hackers are finding coin mining malware as a source to make easy money. Out of them, Monero Mining software is said to top the charts
