Fortinet Discovers Cybercriminals Exploiting New Industry Vulnerabilities at an Accelerated Rate
The FortiGuard Labs 2H 2023 Global Threat Landscape Report was released today by Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT), a world leader in cybersecurity. The report closely examines the current threat landscape, focusing on how cybercriminals are taking advantage of new holes in the cybersecurity industry much more quickly and how ransomware and wiper attacks on industrial and operational technology sectors are becoming more common.
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| Alan Reyes, Country Manager, Fortinet Philippines Rashish Pandey, VP for Marketing and Communications, Asia and ANZ, Fortinet Nap Castillo, Manager, Systems Engineering, Fortinet Philippines |
Some important things we learned in the second half of 2023 are:
- More quickly taking advantage of new weaknesses Cybercriminals are taking advantage of new security holes 43% faster than they were in the first half of 2023. On average, attacks start 4.76 days after the flaws are made public. This makes it very clear how important it is for companies to find vulnerabilities and fix them before they can be used against them.
- An old weakness is still a threat. 41% of the companies that Fortinet checked found flaws in signatures that were less than one month old. It's scary that security holes from more than 15 years ago are still being used, which shows how important it is to patch and update programs regularly.
- Endpoints with Fewer Vulnerabilities Cyberattacks only targeted less than 9% of all known endpoint vulnerabilities. This means that there is a smaller open attack surface, which helps security teams focus their efforts on fixing problems more effectively.
- Ransomware and wiper attacks are becoming more common in industrial areas. Even though 70% less ransomware was found than in the first half of 2023, 44% of all ransomware and wiper samples were still aimed at the industry sectors.
- Botnets Show Off Remarkable Strength Botnets were very strong; contact between command and control (C2) nodes continued for an average of 85 days after they were first found.
- Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Groups That Are Active MITRE lists 143 APT groups. During the second half of 2023, 38 of them were active. Lazarus Group, Kimusky, APT28, APT29, Andariel, and OilRig were the most busy.
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The study also has results from FortiRecon that show how threat actors talk on forums, marketplaces, and Telegram channels on the dark web. Some important results are:
- The target area that was talked about the most was finance, then business services, and finally education.
- On well-known dark web sites, more than 3,000 data breaches were talked about.
- There were ongoing discussions about 221 vulnerabilities on the dark web and 237 vulnerabilities on Telegram channels.
- There were ads for over 850,000 payment cards that were for sale.
Fortinet thinks that a mindset of working together, being open, and taking responsibility is needed to fight cybercrime. Fortinet wants to make the world's cyberspace safer by constantly developing new technologies and working with both the public and private sectors, such as universities, CERTs, and government agencies.
You can find out more by going to www.fortinet.com.
