Over 13,000 malware threats detected every hour in 2020: Report

According to a report by Seqrite, an enterprise security solutions brand by Quick Heal Technologies, out of the total 113 million malware detections in 2020, the first quarter clocked the highest at 36 million detections

New Delhi: With new techniques targeting a completely new setup of the global enterprise, 13,733 malware threats were detected every hour in 2020, with Trojan leading the year-on-year (YoY) and quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) charts followed by other malware, a report said on Wednesday.

According to a report by Seqrite, an enterprise security solutions brand by Quick Heal Technologies, out of the total 113 million malware detections in 2020, the first quarter clocked the highest at 36 million detections, with January witnessing maximum malware attacks.

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“With the advent of Covid-19, threat actors have realised how they can capitalize on this new opportunity by banking on the new vulnerabilities that have popped up due to remote working or work from home (WFH),” Himanshu Dubey, Director, QuickHeal Security Labs, said in a statement.

“Attackers are going to innovate and roll out new ways to target businesses in 2021. It is, therefore, essential for them to invest in robust cybersecurity solutions that can prevent them from being prey to the evolving threat landscape,” Dubey added.

However, the same year also recorded a drop in the number of malware attacks by 35 million compared to 2019.

But evidently, this drop is mainly associated with threats such as Adware and potentially unwanted application (PUA) that are least detrimental in nature, the report said.

Simultaneously, dangerous threats like trojan, ransomware and infector have only escalated further, primarily because of the widely adopted work from home culture.

This transition has emerged as a fresh opportunity for threat actors to bank on, making businesses more vulnerable than ever before, the report said.

In January 2020, the researchers observed new versions of conventional ransomware attacks.

For instance, double extortion, where threat actors not only encrypted but also stole enterprise data in the process. If the victim denied paying a ransom, attackers had the power to disclose all the sensitive data to the public. Therefore, in either way, the target was forced to pay money to the attackers — hence the name double extortion.

2020 also saw many crypto-mining attacks, led by names like Kings Miner (attacks the under patched servers on the Internet), Blue Mockingbird (targets public-facing servers with high configurations) and Lemon Duck Miner (a monero crypto-mining malware that converts network resources of an organization into cryptocurrency mining slaves).