The world of cyber threats keeps changing with new tech and ways to attack. People in charge of security are trying hard to lower the risks linked with artificial intelligence (AI) and also follow various rules set by the government.
IBM just put out their 2023 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, checking out cyber attacks all through 2022. They found out that in almost one-fourth of all the problems fixed in 2022, putting backdoors in at 21% was the main goal.
According to the report, 27% of the time, extortion was what the attackers went for. In the manufacturing field, 30% of the problems were about extortion, showing how cyber criminals are hitting industries that are already struggling.
Phishing is still the biggest way they infect systems, seen in 41% of the attacks, followed by exploiting public apps at 26%. In 2022, there were double the number of attempts to hijack threads every month compared to 2021. Ransomware went down from 21% of attacks in 2021 to 17% in 2022.
The number of issues caused by exploiting vulnerabilities dropped by 19% in 2022 compared to 2021, after going up by 34% from 2020. They found 23,964 vulnerabilities in 2022, up from 21,518 in 2021. The number of vulnerabilities in industrial control systems (ICS) went down in 2022 for the first time in two years — 457 in 2022 compared to 715 in 2021 and 472 in 2020.