NEXT GENERATION FIREWALL BUYER’S GUIDE
The world as we know it has changed, and so has your business. In 2020 companies around the globe looked for ways to connect reliably, scale rapidly, and stay protected as workforces transitioned from on-premises to remote work. At the same time, threat actors did not miss a step. In December the discovery of the SolarWinds supply chain attack became public, one example of a 6th generation cyber attack. Sixth generation cyber attacks include nation state and malware as a service (MaaS) attacks.
According to the 2021 Cyber Security Report the Sunburst attacks that breached thousands of government and private sector organizations was just the tip of the iceberg making up the 2020 attacks. 87% of organizations experienced an attempted exploit of a known vulnerability. In addition to the nation-state style attack of SUNBURST, financially motivated threat actors continued to wage their malware campaigns.
In 2020, on the malware campaign front, we saw double extortion ransomware, email thread hijacking, voice phishing (vishing) as well as attacks targeting cloud infrastructures. Authors of malware campaigns evolved their techniques to take advantage where they could. The costs to businesses and municipalities from ransomware grew from $11.5B in 2019 to $20B in 2020. Attacks against remote access technologies such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and VPN increased. In the first half of 2020 almost a million attack attempts against RDP were observed every day. In the second half threats shifted and focused on vulnerable VPN portals, gateways and applications as new vulnerabilities in these systems became known.
