With cybercriminals costing the global economy US$600 billion last year alone, global digital threat management company RiskIQ tapped proprietary and third-party research to examine the growing volume of malicious activity on the internet to reveal the latest ‘Evil Internet Minute.’
The data shows that in a single ‘evil’ Internet minute, US$1,138,888 is lost to cybercrime and 1,861 people fall victim. Despite businesses’ best efforts to guard against external cyberthreats, spending up to US$171,233 in 60 seconds, attackers continue to proliferate and launch successful campaigns online.
“As the Internet and its community continue to grow at a rapid pace, the threat landscape targeting it grows at scale as well,” said RiskIQ CEO Elias Manousos. “We made the vast numbers associated with it more accessible by framing them in the context of an ‘internet minute’.
“Leveraging the latest research as well as our own global threat intelligence, we’re defining the sheer scale of attacks that take place across the Internet to help businesses better understand what they’re up against on the open web.”
Attacker tactics range from malware to phishing to supply chain attacks targeting third-parties. Their motives include monetary gain, large-scale reputational damage, politics, and espionage.
Cybercriminals continue to find success in a range of tactics including launching 1,274 pieces of unique malware and deploying more than nine malvertisements each evil Internet minute.
RiskIQ’s research has also uncovered additional malicious activity each minute, ranging from blacklisted mobile apps to malvertising:
- A total of 1.5 organisations fell victim to ransomware attacks every minute with an average cost to businesses of US$15,221
- A total of 0.17 blacklisted mobile apps
- There were 0.21 new phishing domains
- A total of 0.07 incidents of the Magecart credit card skimmer
- There were 0.1 new sites running the CoinHive cryptocurrency mining script
- Four potentially vulnerable web components discovered
“As companies innovate online to make more meaningful touchpoints with their customers, partners, and employees, attackers prey on their lack of visibility into their internet-facing attack surface to erode users’ trust and access credentials and sensitive data,” Manousos said.
“Businesses must realise that they are vulnerable beyond the firewall, all the way across the open internet.”
To view RiskIQ’s Evil Internet Minute infographic, visit riskiq.com/infographic/evil-internet-minute-2018/
Commenting on this, Ryan Wilk, Vice President at NuData Security, a Mastercard company, said: “Organised cybercrime is growing stronger each day, creating ever more advanced waves of malware as well as phishing and other online fraud techniques. One important result of this is the accelerating adoption of advanced fraud prevention and security solutions by major brands and other consumer-facing sectors that transact online.
“Company’s fraud losses are proportional to the fraudster’s success in using the victim’s data to steal money, services and goods. It is for this reason that businesses are starting to implement solutions that can devalue this stolen data and better protect user accounts.
“These technologies let organisations immediately verify users based on their previous behaviours and interactions, and can also spot and thwart fraud attempts in real time before losses occur.”
