WatchGuard’s latest Quarterly Internet Security Report says that 30% of malware attacks are new or zero day exploits, which means antivirus solutions that rely on previous signatures are missing a huge chunk of the cyber threat landscape.
The Quarterly Internet report, based on analytics from WatchGuard's Threat Lab, looks at the latest security and network threats affecting small businesses and enterprises.
In Q4 2016, WatchGuard blocked 30.4 million network attacks and 18.7 million malware variants.
The APAC region fared reasonably well, accounting for 6% of malware attacks and 1% of network attacks. However, all of the top ten Word macro malware variants primarily affected China and the United States.
“Our Threat Lab has been monitoring the most prevalent security industry threats and trends for years and now with the addition of the Firebox Feed—anonymised threat analytics from Fireboxes deployed around the world—we have firsthand, acute insight into the evolution of cyber attacks and how threat actors are behaving,” comments WatchGuard CTO Corey Nachreiner.
The report found that because 30% of malware is new and undetected by legacy AV solutions, it shows that cyber criminals’ ability to hide or repack their creations is outpacing the security industry’s efforts to keep up with them.
WatchGuard says that without an advanced threat protection solution, organisations would fail to detect a third of all malware.
Here are some of the major trends from the Quarterly Internet Security Report:
So how do organisations protect against attacks? WatchGuard has some basic tips.