Threat Intel Report 2020

Trend Micro detected 119,000 cyber threats per minute in 2020 as home workers and infrastructure came under new pressure from attacks. The cybersecurity company revealed in its 2020 round-up report.

Trend Micro found attacks on homes surged 210% to reach nearly 2.9 billion–amounting to 15.5% of all homes. The vast majority (73%) of attacks on home networks involved brute forcing logins to gain control of a router or smart device.

Trend Micro blocked 62.6 billion threats blocked by last year and 91% of them were email-borne threats. Phishing attacks continued to be hugely popular among cybercriminals. The company detected nearly 14 million unique phishing URLs in 2020 as attackers targeted distracted home workers.

Key Trends

Newly detected ransomware families increased 34%, with “double extortion” attacks ,where attackers steal data before encrypting it to force payment by threatening to release the stolen information and more targeted threats becoming increasingly popular. Government, banking, manufacturing and healthcare were the most targeted sectors.

The number of vulnerabilities published by the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) increased 40% year-on-year, but Trend Micro continues to see flaws from as far back as 2005 being heavily exploited.

Many attacks targeted flaws in VPNs used by remote workers. CVE-2019-11510, a critical arbitrary file disclosure flaw in Pulse Connect Secure, already has nearly 800,000 hits based on Trend Micro customer data.

Cloud service misconfigurations increasingly had consequences in 2020. Trend Micro observed exploitation of unsecured APIs in several cryptocurrency mining attacks.

The ZDI published 1,453 vulnerability advisories, nearly 80% of which were rated as Critical or High severity. Positively there was a 17% fall in detections of BEC attacks, although there’s no indication of how many were successful.