2022 Q1 Cyber Trends
The non-profit organization Identity Theft Resource Center recently reported that the number of data breeches experienced in the US during the first quarter of 2022 have increased for the third year in a row. While we know almost all (90%+) of the known-cause breaches have come from phishing or ransomware, nearly 40% of all breeches were reported without a root cause. While data leaks did go down, the industry belief is that this is due to a decrease in activity from large hacking rings and that the members of these groups are likely to find other groups to pick back up with.
What does this mean going forward?
With the first quarter of each year commonly being the slowest for cyber criminal, yet another year of increases (over 10%) at the slowest time of the year means that organizations should expect another year of increasing attacks.
With your proper firewall/UTM and antivirus, hopefully that doesn’t lead to any increased notice from the user end in many areas. It does mean that end users can expect to begin seeing even more spam and phishing attacks through emails as well as increased web advertisements that lead to websites meant to scam individuals. This is why phishing training programs and email filters have become so much more popular over the past year or so.
If you have a question about your firewall/UTM or your antivirus platform, please feel free to reach out to us. We can also assist with setting up and managing a phishing training program and/or an email filter for your organization, should that be of interest to you.
