According to Check Point, the number of cyberattacks recorded last year was almost two-fifths (38%) of the total volume observed in 2021.
Security vendors attributed this increase primarily to a surge in attacks against healthcare organizations, which saw the largest year-over-year (74%) increase (74%), and the activity of smaller and more agile hacking groups. claimed to be.
Overall, attacks hit an all-time high in Q4, averaging 1,168 attacks per week per organization. Weekly average figures for the year were highest for education sector organizations (2314), government and military (1661) and health care (1463).
According to Omer Dembinsky, Data Group Manager at Check Point, attackers are taking advantage of security gaps created by the shift to working and learning remotely.
“The ransomware ecosystem continues to evolve and grow with smaller, more agile criminal groups forming to evade law enforcement,” he argued.
“Second, hackers have broadened their motives to target business collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams, OneDrive, and Google Drive with phishing attacks. Given the , these are rich sources of sensitive data.”
Denbinski predicts AI tools like ChatGPT will continue to fuel the surge in attacks in 2023 by enabling malicious actors to generate malicious code and emails more quickly and easily. Did.
Recorded cyberattacks against organizations in the US increased by 57% year-on-year in 2022, but the figure was even higher in the UK (77%).
This is in line with data from UK ISP Beaming, which said 2022 was the year with the most attacks on record.
In 2022, 687,489 attempts to break into UK businesses were recorded. This equates to one attack every 46 seconds.
October-December 2022 was the busiest quarter since Beaming began tracking these stats in 2016. Its customers experienced an average of 177,228 cyberattacks each during this period.
Beaming Managing Director Sonia Blizzard warns:
“A company that hasn’t improved its online resilience in the past year or so is a no-brainer for hackers.”
