Crypto miners and malware attacks grew since 2019
According to the figures presented by the cybersecurity company WatchGuard, a growth of 888 % has been seen during 2020
Fileless malware attacks soared 888 % in 2020 compared to the previous year, while ransomware attacks grew 25 % taking advantage of the upward trend in cryptocurrencies.
The exacerbation of malware attacks in 2020 is the most upward trend in 2020 compared to 2019 data, according to the Internet Security Report for the fourth quarter of 2020 sent to journalists by the intelligence and cybersecurity company WatchGuard ,
WatchGuard stated that this type of threat is capable of bypassing traditional endpoint detection systems and even succeeding without victims doing anything beyond clicking a malicious link or unknowingly visiting a compromised website.
Toolkits such as PowerSploit and CobaltStrike allow threat actors to easily inject malicious code into other running processes and continue to operate even if the victim’s defenses identify and remove the original script.
For this reason, from the cybersecurity company they point out that the deployment of detection and response solutions on the ‘endpoint’, together with preventive ‘antimalware’, can help to identify these threats.
The results show that infections of crypto miners rose in 2020, with the detection of 850 unique variants compared to 633 the previous year (increase of 25 %). This disparity is explained by the upward change of cryptocurrencies in the market, which in 2018 suffered a drop in value and have rebounded in 2020.
This change in price has caused attackers to add crypto mining modules to existing ‘botnet’ infections and continue to extract passive income from victims.
K. Tovar
Source: dpa
