“Record High Number of Cyber Threats Detected in 2022”

Cyberattacks Rise by 55% in 2022, Trend Micro Reports

A new report from Trend Micro has revealed that cyberattacks rose by 55% in 2022 compared to the previous year. The company also reported that its products blocked 242% more malicious files in 2022, as threat actors targeted both consumers and organizations indiscriminately.

According to Trend Micro, threat actors most often gain initial access through remote services, before expanding their footprint through credential dumping. The company also observed an 86% increase in malware designed to enable persistence on compromised endpoints.

Log4j Still Lingers

Trend Micro’s report also revealed that the number of Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) advisories hit record numbers for the third year in a row, reaching 1,706 in 2022. The company believes this is due to a rapidly expanding corporate attack surface, as well as higher investments in automated analysis tools that are able to find more bugs. In fact, the number of critical vulnerabilities discovered in 2022 was double that of 2021.

Two out of the top three CVEs reported in 2022 were related to Log4j, which still seems to be a major problem years after its discovery. Failed patches and confusing advisories are also on the rise, forcing organizations to spend more time and money to remedy potential problems and exposing them to additional and unnecessary risk.

To tackle the increasingly volatile cybercrime problem, Trend Micro recommends that businesses regularly examine assets to determine their criticality, ensure that the cloud infrastructure is properly configured with security in mind, and prioritize updating software as soon as possible to minimize the potential for exploitation.

According to Jon Clay, VP of Threat Intelligence at Trend Micro, 2022 was “a year when threat actors went ‘all-in’ to boost profits.” He added that “a surge in backdoor detections is particularly concerning in showing us their success in making landfall inside networks. To manage risk effectively across a rapidly expanding attack surface, stretched security teams need a more streamlined, platform-based approach.”

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he has written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He has also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.