KUALA LUMPUR: Trend Micro Incorporated announced that the company has detected a 42 per cent increase on the number of cyber-threats detected last year as compared to the detections recorded in 2020.
A statement released by the cybersecurity company reveals that attacks surged by over 53 billion in the second half of 2021 after its industry-leading threat intelligence infrastructure, Smart Protection Network (SPN) blocked 41 billion threats in the first half totalling to 94,289,585,240 billion threats heading for consumer, government and business customers were successfully intercepted in 2021.
Particularly in Malaysia, Trend Micro shared that it has blocked 478 million total attacks in 2021, a 12 per cent increase year-on-year from 2020. The attacks have escalated by over 247 million in the second half, up six per cent as compared to detections in the first half of the year.
Trend Micro Malaysia and nascent countries' managing director, Goh Chee Hoh said that the threats detections were made across endpoints–mobile, servers, IoT/IIoT, home networks, messaging, network, web and cloud environments as a testament to the company's continuous effort to expand attack surface protections.
"Our advanced detection technologies deployed to 500,000 commercial and government accounts and millions of consumer customers. But it also underscores the mounting threat from bad actors, as outlined in our 2022 predictions report," he said.
Despite a double-digit surge in detected cyber-threats from 2020 to 2021, Trend Micro blocked 66 per cent fewer ransomware attacks over the period, reinforcing the theory that these threats are becoming more targeted.
Another contributing factor in this decrease, shared Trend Micro is that more ransomware attacks are being blocked in earlier stages before being deployed. Over 14 million attacks were proactively stopped in 2021 before they could impact customers.
This trend was similarly reflected in Malaysia where a 42 per cent decrease in the number of ransomware attacks was detected in the corresponding period, from 177,339 to 102,687.
As ransomware operators continue to evolve their tactics to become highly-targeted and sophisticated – using double-extortion and multilevel extortion techniques to yield ransom demands – the need for local enterprises to adopt solutions such as Trend Micro Vision One that provide multilayered protection and behaviour detection is ever-more important.
The statement also included a detected malware surge of 103 per cent as compared to 2020 to over 14 million is likely due to threat actors taking advantage of the rise in online consumption during prolonged lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements brought on by the pandemic.
Even with the company's comprehensive cloud-first protection capabilities, Trend Micro advice is for security teams to be prepared for another onslaught of threats in 2022. It predicts that IoT systems, global supply chains, cloud environments and DevOps functions will come under increasing scrutiny from attackers over the coming year.