Living in a pandemic is stressful. But protecting system assets from cyber-attack during a pandemic is close to slaying a dragon for cyber professionals. With 2020 behind us Tenable has compiled a threat landscape report on cyber-attacks of the year.
The 2020 Threat Landscape Retrospective
- From January to October 2020, 730 publicly disclosed events ended up exposing 22 billion records.
- 35% of those breaches were caused by ransomware attacks, with huge financial costs to victims.
- 14% of those breaches were a result of email compromises.
- 18,358 new CVEs were reported in 2020, which is a 6% increase from 2019 and 183% increase from 2015.
- Over 35% of zero-day flaws stem from web browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.
- In 2020, 18 ransomware groups were using leaked websites.
The landscape indicates the ways in which threat actors are targeting their victims, and the methods they are using. The main things to take away from the report are:
- Focus shouldn’t be only on critical vulnerabilities.
- Remote work is still a concern and a target for many threat actors.
- Unpatched VPNs continue to be a gold mine for hackers.
A number of top vulnerabilities that support the main points from the report are a focus.
Top 5 Vulnerabilities of 2020
- Zerologon (CVE-2020-14720)
- Citrix ADC/Gateway/SDWAN WAN-OP (CVE-2019-19871)
- Pulse Connect Secure SSL VPN (CVE-2019-11510)
- Fortinet Fortigate SSL VPN (CVE-2018-13379)
- F5 BIG-IP (CVE-2020-5902)
The threats that are prevalent in this report follow the environment caused by the pandemic, and suggest that organisations should protect their virtual machines as much as possible, while also enforcing hygienic approach to remote work standards.
Contact us at Agilient for recent cyber trends and industry standards, and advice on how to keep your business and systems secure.
Author: Saeed Baayoun, Agilient Consultant