"Cyber Extortion Dominates the Threat Landscape"

Cyber extortion affects businesses of all sizes worldwide, with 82 percent of cases observed being small businesses, up from 78 percent last year. According to Orange Cyberdefense's latest Security Navigator report, there was a noticeable slowdown in cybercrime at the start of the Ukraine war, but the intensity quickly increased again. For example, the number of cyber extortion victims in East Asia and South East Asia has increased by 30 percent and 33 percent, respectively, in the last six months. Furthermore, from 2021 to 2022, victim volumes increased by 18 percent in the EU, 21 percent in the UK, and 138 percent in the Nordic countries. However, volumes fell by 8 percent in North America and 32 percent in Canada. Small businesses are targeted four and a half times more than medium and large businesses combined, while the public sector accounts for the fifth highest proportion of incidents in Orange's CyberSOCs. The manufacturing sector remains the most vulnerable to cyber extortion, despite ranking fifth among industries most willing to pay ransoms, according to the research. Criminals in this sector are compromising conventional Information Technology (IT) systems rather than the more specialized Operational Technology (OT). In 2021, 547 Android vulnerabilities and 357 iOS vulnerabilities were reported. In comparison, only 24 percent of iOS vulnerabilities have a low attack complexity. Due to the ecosystem's uniformity, the findings show that a higher number of iPhone users are vulnerable when a security issue is first disclosed. Users migrate to a new version quickly, with 70 percent updating within 51 days of the patch's release. Since the Android ecosystem is more fractured, devices are often left open to more old exploits, while fewer may be vulnerable to new exploits. This article continues to discuss key findings from Orange Cyberdefense's latest Security Navigator report.

BetaNews reports "Cyber Extortion Dominates the Threat Landscape"