Decline in cyber attacks on finance sector in APAC
NTT Security, the specialised security company for NTT Group, has published its 2018 Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR) stating the number of attacks on the finance sector in APAC has dropped from 46 per cent to 26 per cent compared to the previous year, along with three new industries that made it to the top five attacked industries – technology, retail and government.
NTT Security summarises data from over 6.1 trillion logs and 150 million attacks for the 2018 GTIR, which analyses global threat trends based on log, event, attack, incident and vulnerability data from the NTT Group’s operating companies. It highlights the latest ransomware, phishing and DDoS attack trends in demonstrating the evolving threat landscape faced by global organisations.
In APAC, the report shows the attacks targeting the finance sector have continued to be a threat despite a 20 per cent drop versus a year ago. On the other hand, attacks targeting the manufacturing sector have significantly decreased to seven per cent from 32 per cent in the same period last year. Even though the APAC region tends to have a strong representation in the manufacturing sector, with China and Korea being two of the world’s leading manufacturing countries, the sector is no longer listed among the top five most attacked industries in this year’s report.
Attacks against retail and education sectors were at 15 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. Education, in particular, saw a dramatic jump from three per cent to 18 per cent in attack volume, alongside technology industry from five per cent to 16 per cent. Technology was the only sector to appear in the top five most attacked industries in every geographic region (Americas, APAC, EMEA and Japan, as well as globally).
Though most regions saw a decrease in attacks against government targets, APAC actually had a seven per cent increase, from six per cent to 13 per cent.
Overall, the top five most targeted industries in APAC, namely finance, education, technology, retail and government, comprised 88 per cent of all attacks last year. This suggests that attackers spread out attacks more evenly across a focused set of industries.
In APAC, viruses and worms accounted for 66 per cent of malware, nearly three times the global percentage of 23 per cent. Whilst the report shows an increasing trend of ransomware nearly in every region, it played a role in only 2 per cent of malware-related attacks for APAC targets.
Conversely, brute force attacks accounted for 26 per cent of all attacks in the region, but were ranked the twelfth most common attack type in both the Americas and EMEA.