In a recent IBM report, the security experts from the X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) have analyzed the cyber threat landscape to uncover key attack tactics, how these attack methods are succeeding, and what industries are the most impacted.
Key findings from IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence 2019 report include:
- The financial industry represents 19% of total attacks and incidents, and continues to be the most targeted industry with transportation services coming in second, at 13 percent of total attacks and incidents
- Threat actors are moving away from using malicious files in their attacks, favoring other methods like coin-mining malware to carry out their objectives
- Looking at the targets of phishing attacks in 2018, 27% of the phishing incidents note that attackers target users of web mail services
Other notes:
- Banking Trojans were the business of organized crime in 2018, with the global chart topped by familiar malware families, such as TrickBot, Gozi, Ramnit, or IcedID. Financially motivated threat actors’ use of TrickBot variants made this financial malware the most actively tracked gang in 2018, according to X-Force researchers’ analysis of global banking Trojan activity.
- Criminals are increasingly leveraging coin-mining malware over ransomware, installing miners on victim endpoints and enslaving them, thus slowly generating coins for the attacker. Spreading to every part of the globe, financially motivated threat actors in Eastern Europe and North Korea have taken special notice of the profitability of coin-mining malware since consumers in these regions have adopted the use of cryptocurrency as a regular payment
method for everyday transactions.