2023 Threat Report – Dramatic Surge in Social Engineering and Web Attacks

The Second quarter of 2023 has shown a significant increase in the overall cyber-threat risks. The blocking of unique web attacks rose to 24% which accounts for more than 700 million unique blocked attacks each month.

Among these cyber risks, Social engineering and web-related threats have surged drastically, which include scams, Phishing, Adware, Trojans, File Infectors, and other types of risks when compared to other cyber threats.

Threat Vectors Based on Attack Types

Furthermore, the shielding of blocked attack statistics showed 594 million web-related attacks, 37 million file-based attacks, 14 million email-based attacks, 5 million behavioral threats, 3 million exploits, 600k scripts, and 500k other types of attacks.

In addition, blocked URLs accounted for 147 million and blocked files contributed to 61 million during the second quarter of 2023.

Among these attack vectors, Desktop-related attack types and Mobile-related malware types were analyzed which yielded further depth to the attacking methodologies of threat actors.

Statistical Analysis

The highest number of ransomware attacks were in Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Angola, Ghana, Republic of Korea.

Along with this, the Avast threat report showed most common coin miners were Web miners (various strains), XMRig, FakeKMSminer, VMiner, CoinBitMiner, CoinHelper, and NeoScrypt, which were the most common coin miners.

Information stealer malware saw a 14% decrease in Q2 of 2023. However, the most common info stealer malware were AgentTesla, FormBook, Raccoon Stealer, RedLine, Fareit, Lokibot, and ViperSoftX.

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Desktop-related Threats and Mobile related Threats

Threat actors targeting desktop devices have been increasing day by day and organizations are taking several precautionary methods to prevent attacks from breaching their security measures. However, Desktop-related threats still remain prevalent.

In the pool of Desktop-related threats, Scams accounted for 51%, Phishing 25.6%, Trojan 3.5 %, Adware 3.8 %, File infectors 2.9 %, and other types of attacks 13.1%.

The scam has seen a surge of 101.9%, followed by Phishing with 6.6%. However, Trojan and File infectors have seen a reduction from the last quarter.

However, Mobile related threats showed dropper malware having a huge surge of 86% in the last quarter. The overall report showed Adware at 73.6% risks, followed by Dropper at 6.1%, Banker malware at 5.8 %, Trojan at 3.9%, and other types of malware at 7.5%.

Avast has released a complete report on the threat report of Q2 of 2023 which showed detailed information on the threats, malware, info stealers, ransomware, and related attack vectors.

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