Significant rise in cyberattacks is putting security teams under pressure

There has been a significant rise in both genuine cyber threats and false positive alerts, a new report from Orange Cyberdefense suggests. As a result, cybersecurity teams everywhere are feeling the heat.

The company analyzed more than 500 billion security events occurring over the course of the last year (from October 2020 to October 2021), and uncovered a 13 percent increase in cyberattacks on enterprises. 

Of the 95,000 potential incidents flagged, more than a third (34,000) were legitimate events, up 13 percent year-on-year. More than a third (38 percent) were malware-related, up 18 percent. 

“Noise”, or false positives, also increased by five percent compared to 2020. In total, two-thirds (64 percent) of all threat alerts were not genuine, but it still took businesses significant resources to make sure they weren’t under immediate threat.

The report also states that, for the first time, there was a “noticeable” wave of attacks against mobile devices, running both iOS and Android. The researchers predict attacks targeting mobile devices will most likely continue on their upwards trajectory for years to come, which is cause for concern given many people use their mobile device for two-factor authentication.

“Attacks like Solorigate show that even trusted software from reliable vendors can turn into a trojan horse for cunning attackers. Technology alone cannot be the solution to this problem, and as our data shows, we have seen a 13 percent increase in the number of incidents in just one year, and these incidents keep increasing year on year,” said Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense. 

“A large proportion of the tech-driven security alerts that our analysts deal with are just noise but this puts a tremendous strain on already stretched IT and security teams. Indeed, not all businesses have the means or resources to employ managed security services providers to help them sift through the ‘noise’ and find the actionable security ‘signals’. We thus believe that security technologies can, and must, do better.”

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