The survey of digital sexual blackmail cases, according to the Fast Facts report, is based on unique IP addresses
THE Trend Micro, world leader in cybersecurity solutions, released the “Fast Facts” report with an analysis of the global cyber threat landscape for March 2022, including comparison with previous months. The survey shows that the Brazil continues to lead the ranking of extortion threats via email, including those of a sexual nature, taking into account unique IP addresses. Two other South American countries appear in the list of the 10 main disseminators of this type of digital crime: Argentina and Peru.
The upward trend in the number of cyberattacks continued in March, with a total of 11.2 billion threats being blocked, with 7 billion being blocked by email (63% of detected threats). In 2021, Trend Micro blocked 94.2 billion attempted cyber attacks, an increase of 42% from 2020. Of this total, almost 70 billion of threats occurred via email.
The United States (31.2%) remains the top target for this type of attack, with China (9.7%) in second place. The United Kingdom (6.1%) is third, followed by Japan (5.5%) and India (5.1%)
ransomware
Ransomware attacks doubled in March, jumping from about 1.2 million in February to nearly 2.5 million, worrying security analysts. Large companies remain the preferred target for attackers, but Japan (20.6%) took first place from the United States (13.1%). Mexico (8.2%), Turkey (6.4%) and India (4.4%) are also in the crosshairs of cybercriminals. In 2021, a total of 14 million ransomware attacks worldwide.
Looking at the activity of the top malware families, Emotet was featured in March, with victims all over the world, leading in Japan, the UK and Italy, and ranking fourth in the US.
Cyber criminals continue to carefully select their targets, in order to obtain the greatest possible monetary gain by carrying out the fewest attacks. In the monthly comparison, the industry was the most targeted sector in March, displacing the government area. Health and education also remain on the priority list, with the financial sector firmly in fifth position.
Covid-19
Trend Micro continues to monitor Covid-19-related threats, using keywords as a basis. After peaking in the second quarter of 2021, significant growth was noticed in January this year, with 959,000 registrations. But since then, attacks have dropped significantly, with 552 million cases in February and around 470 million in March.
Most Covid-19-related threats arrive via email (446 million), followed by malicious URLs (almost 14 million). Still, social engineering, with emails and phishing sites (9.8 million), is a key tactic for attackers. There was no change in the scenario of hardest-hit countries, with most of the March occurrences recorded in the United States and Germany.
The “Fast Facts” report is released by the Trend Micro research team with monthly updates on the threat landscape, based on the solution Trend Micro Smart Protection Network (SPN), which analyzes the data security infrastructure. The data collected also contains analysis from researchers at Trend Micro, the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) team, the Threat Hunting team, the Mobile Application Reputation Service (MARS) team, and the Smart Home Network (SHN).
For more details on the report, go to ON HERE.
