When it comes to the recent cybersecurity trends, attackers were found to leverage more than 500 unique tools and tactics in 2022, said Sophos recently when releasing its Active Adversary Report for Business Leaders.
Unpatched vulnerabilities were the most common root cause of attackers gaining initial access to targeted systems, according to the firm.
In half of investigations included in the report, attackers exploited ProxyShell and Log4Shell vulnerabilities—vulnerabilities from 2021—to infiltrate organisations, the firm said, adding that the second most common root cause of attacks was compromised credentials.
“When today's attackers aren't breaking in, they're logging in,” said John Shier, field CTO, Sophos. “The reality is that the threat environment has grown in volume and complexity to the point where there are no discernible gaps for defenders to exploit.”
Highlights of cybersecurity trends
- More than two-thirds of the attacks that the Sophos IR team investigated (68%) involved ransomware, demonstrating that ransomware is still one of the most pervasive threats for companies.
- Ransomware also accounted for nearly three-quarters of Sophos’ IR investigations over the past three years.
- While ransomware still dominates the threat landscape, attacker dwell time decreased in 2022, from 15 to 10 days, for all attack types.
- For ransomware cases, the dwell time decreased from 11 to nine days, while the decrease was even greater for non-ransomware attacks.
- The dwell time for the latter declined from 34 days in 2021 to just 11 days in 2022. However, unlike in past years, there was no significant variation in dwell times between different sized organisations or sectors.
According to Sophos, its report is based on 152 incident response (IR) investigations spanning the globe across 22 sectors while targeted organisations were located in 31 different countries, including the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Romania, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.
