SonicWall published its 2024 Mid-Year Cyber Threat report. This survey, which was researched and compiled by SonicWall Capture Labs, disclosed an additional rise in overall attacks after seeing an 11 percent increase in 2023. The report detailed the evolving threat landscape over the first five months of this year, and highlighted the persistent, relentless and escalating nature of cyber threats, worldwide.
The report was built with SonicWall partners in mind, having evolved in how it measures critical cyberthreat data to include time as a factor. It also highlights the latest trends impacting partners and the customers that they serve, and, for the first time, ties attacks to tangible business impact, including potential revenue risk.
“As threat actors continue to add more efficient and sophisticated tactics, we knew the threat report had to evolve to suit our partners and customer’s needs,” said SonicWall president and CEO, Bob VanKirk. “The report is current and includes timely trends and provides our partners, MSPs, MSSPS and customers with actionable intelligence to help them create and implement strategies to help their customers combat these threats whether new or old.”
SonicWall found that, on average, companies were under critical attack that depletes business resources for 1,104 hours out of 880 work hours. That means that customers were shielded from a potential 46 days of business downtime in just the first five months of 2024, protecting 12.6 percent of total revenues and defending against potentially devastating intrusions.
“The data and examples found in the report provide real life examples of how crafty and swift malicious actors operate, underscoring that traditional cybersecurity defenses often prove to be the most reliable,” said SonicWall executive director of threat research, Douglas McKee. “Data is not just a resource; it’s our frontline defense against cybercrime, revealing critical insights that inform allocation of resources and enable targeted and proactive cybersecurity measures.”
The report provided insight on a range of threats, including:
• Malware, which rose 30 percent, worldwide, in 1H24, seeing a 92 percent increase in May alone.
• Ransomware, which increased 15 percent (North America) and 51 percent (Latin America), but was down 49 percent in the EMEA.
• IoT malware attacks, which rose by 107 percent, with affected devices averaging 52.8 hours under attack. Additionally, 15 percent of malware uses software packing as its main MITRE TTP.
• Cryptojacking, which fell 60 percent. Most of the globe saw a decrease, with the exception of India, which saw a 409 percent increase.
SonicWall’s Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection technology identified a total of 78,923 never-before-seen malware variants in the first five months of 2024, with over 500 strains of new variants discovered each day.
For the full report, click here.
For SonicWall’s SecureFirst partner program, visit here.
