Big jump in cyberattacks ‘overwhelming’ business, warns cybersecurity firm

There has been an exponential increase in cyberattacks so far this year that is “overwhelming businesses”, with at least 12.6% of an organisation’s revenues at risk from cyber threats, according to a recent industry report by cybersecurity company SonicWall.

Its latest threat report for the first five months of this year found that cyber threats are evolving as well as escalating, with SonicWall identifying 78,923 “never-before-seen” malware variants, at a rate of 526 a day.

And despite insurers’ attention on the growing risk of ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) remains the most common form of cyberattack and ten times more common than ransomware, the stats show.

However, ransomware attacks have grown in number, particularly in Latin America where they have jumped 51% in the first five months of 2024. However, ransomware attacks were down in EMEA by 49% over this period, the report says.

Only one other cyber threat, cryptojacking, whereby criminals secretly use a victim’s computer power to generate cryptocurrency, saw a decrease after a record-breaking 2023.

Total global malware volume rose 30% in the first five months of 2024, including a surge of attacks in May where the numbers rose by 92%, according to SonicWall.

Phishing remains a major threat and is still the most common initial attack vendor for ransomware infections reported to insurers, it finds.

“The threat landscape is completely overwhelming for organisations and the teams who defend them,” said SonicWall Partner and Fornida COO Steven Huang. “Most cybersecurity breaches include some degree of human error.”

“Ultimately, there are two ways to battle this: reducing opportunity and educating users. The fewer opportunities there are for an error, the less users will be tested. And the more knowledge they have, the less likely they are to make a mistake even when they face an opportunity to do so,” he added.