Page 41 - CDM-CYBER-DEFENSE-eMAGAZINE-December-2018

Ransomware and Cyber Attacks Dive in 2018

Sean Sullivan, Security Advisor, F-Secure

Cyber-crime isn’t tied to a calendar. But when the calendar hit 2018, the threat landscape seemed to
transform suddenly.

In 2017, the two largest ransomware outbreaks ever – WannaCry and NotPetya – rocked businesses
around the world. F-Securer’s global network of honeypot servers detected 546 million ransomware
attacks in the last half of 2017 yet, in 2018, attacks were slowing with a total of just 246 million.

From Russia, With…Love?

So what accounted for much of the overall reductions in attacks? The answer - one country.

F-Secure began reporting data from decoy servers set up expressly to attract the interest of attackers in
2016. Since then, Russia has been the source of the greatest number of attacks. But in the first six
months of this year, the UK knocked Russia out of its usual first place.

The United States remained the top destination country for attacks at 97.7 million attacks. Russia endured
a little less than third of that volume with 32.7 million attacks and Germany was hit by 29.6 million in third
place.

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