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verview Security teams and the
organisations they support live in difficult
times: they increasingly are the targets of
sophisticated threats developed by a shadowy and
very well financed cybercrime industry that has
demonstrated it can often outsmart even the most
robust security defences.
Cybercriminals are aided by the fact that security
teams often lack the human and financial
resources necessary to keep pace, and so often
cannot defend against the latest threats that are
directed against them.
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Add to this the fact that security teams often
support users who unwittingly aid cybercriminals
(or occasionally become them) through mistakes or
intentional acts that can result in the loss of sensitive
data or corporate funds. Consider what security
teams are up against:
• Cryptocurrency mining on endpoints increased by
8,500% during 2017 and the trend is accelerating:
one vendor found that the deployment of illicit
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cryptomining scripts grew by 725 % during a four
month period ending in January 2018.
The practice of injecting malware into software
updates increased by 200 % during 2017.
The number of web application vulnerabilities
increased by 212 % in 2017, and more than one-
half of these vulnerabilities have a public exploit
that hackers can use.
There was a 54 % increase in mobile malware
during 2017.
In February 2018, there was one phishing attempt
in every 3,331 emails and one piece of malware
for every 645 emails. That means that in an
organisation of 500 email users who receive
a median of 100 emails per day, the security
infrastructure will receive 15 phishing attempts
and 77 pieces of malware each day.
While the massive ransomware campaigns we
saw in 2015 and 2016 have abated to some
extent, we continue to see targeted ransomware
campaigns focused on specific industries like
healthcare and government, among others.
Moreover, the number of ransomware variants
continues to increase: one source found a 74%
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