A shade less than 270 million malware attacks were identified during the first quarter of the year, according to research from Atlas VPN. Cybersecurity is taking on much more importance with CDG clients, and research like this explains why.
The most common of the identified attacks were “infectors,” which are viruses that attach themselves to executable software that spreads to other programs and/or networks. This approach was used in 28.78 million attacks.
That was followed by worms (25.31 million), adware (19.4 million), exploits (17.65 million), cryptojacking (4.89 million) and ransomware (850,000). Perhaps most significantly, however, is that the unspecified/other category was dominant, with 173.09 million – 64.11% — of the total.
The number of attacks declined by month. There were 87.14 million in January, 84.33 in February and 67.18 in March. The unknown played a big role in this category as well: Detection months could not be determined for 31.2 million detections.
Atlas VPN used data from Seqriteto and Quick Heel to determine the most effective scans. Detections were found most often by network scans (37% of detections), followed by real-time scans (22%), web security scans (15%), on-demand scans (13%), behavioral detection scan (11%) and email scan and memory scan (1% each).
COVID-19 has greatly impacted the way in which people work. That had an impact on security at least at the end of the quarter – and is set to grow. “It is safe to assume that threat actors became more active in the first quarter of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Atlas VPN COO Rachel Welch said in the report. “Many people started working from home, which created opportunities for hackers to infect unsecured networks. We can expect similar or even higher numbers in the second quarter of 2020.”
In addition to pointing to the changing dynamics of malware in light of the pandemic, an important takeaway from the report is how much is not known, with more than six in ten types of malware classified as “other/unspecified” and with an unspecified month of detection in more than three in ten cases.