Secureworks has announced its ‘Incident Response Insights Report 2019’ which provides a unique view into how and why organisations face cyber security attacks.

 Why is this interesting?

Secureworks examined the most commonly observed attack vectors used by adversaries in 2018 to understand why they’re having success and what organisations can do about it. Interestingly, the team observed that businesses are making the same mistakes year on year and as a result threat actors are sticking with the same methods as they know it works. The research also showed that the majority of attacks are financially motivated, whereas conversely only 7% of those monitored where government sponsored.  

Latest research highlights a sense of déjà vu as organisations are still making the same mistakes year on year

Secureworks has today announced the findings of a research report which analysed more than a thousand incident response engagements throughout 2018. The incidents observed by Secureworks revealed that organisations are making the same fundamental security mistakes year on year - despite several high profile fines and data breaches in recent months. As a result, attackers are following a path of evolution rather than revolution, sticking with methods that they know will work.

The research highlighted:

• 85% of attacks monitored are financially motivated
• 8% of incidents were from insider threats
• Only 7% of attacks where government sponsored

In previous years, government-sponsored, criminal, and hacktivist groups each had a distinct way of operating. For example, government-sponsored actors often invested time and resources into developing their own malware to use in highly targeted attacks, whereas financially motivated criminals used indiscriminate and broader-scale tactics.

Secureworks also investigated popular attack methods. Business email fraud, ransomware, digital currency mining (also known as cryptomining), and banking trojan activities constituted over 60% of the total attack methods. When it came to the financially motivated attacks, 21% of these involved business email frauds.

Compared to previous years, ransomware attacks tended to be more serious in impact with threat actors increasingly trying to gain access to entire networks to deploy payloads across a large number of systems.

Government-sponsored actors continued to target organisations for various strategic objectives, but capability across groups continues to diverge. Many groups conduct entire intrusions using publicly available tools and techniques, whereas others adopt increasingly sophisticated approaches to gain access to systems.

Constantly changing IT environments, corporate priorities, and relationships with third parties continues to create cybersecurity challenges year after year. To reduce risk exposure, organizations should close the gaps they can control and make the company less of a target.