The cybersecurity threat landscape is constantly evolving as new threat actors, technologies and threats emerge, creating an uncertain world for organisations and the public alike with potential pitfalls in even opening an email. 

Cybersecurity professionals must stay vigilant and ahead of rapidly evolving schemes, threats and strategies by the cybercriminals who are leveraging open-source technologies and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. 

Based on the findings from the Kaspersky Incident Response Analyst Report 2023, the present scale of cyber-threats saw that 75 percent of the cyberattack attempts exploited Microsoft Office. In terms of infection vectors, 42.3 percent of successful attempts used publicly available applications with 20.3 percent using compromised accounts while just 8.5 percent used brute force credentials.

When it comes to infection vectors, most incursions were on attackers using stolen or purchased credentials before committing a remote desktop protocol (RDP) attack, phishing emails loaded with malicious attachments and links and malicious files on public resources imitating document templates. As a silver lining, attack attempts dropped by 36 percent in 1Q of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022.

After incurring a cyberattack, the aftermath resulted in 33.3 percent of organisations getting their data encrypted, 21.1 percent incurring data theft and 12.2 percent encountered compromised active directories. 

Based on a prior Kaspersky survey conducted in 2022, the biggest looming cyberthreat risk is ransom-ware (66 percent) along with data theft (also 66 percent), followed closely by the cybersabotage (62 percent), supply chain attacks (60 percent) and DDos attacks (also 60 percent), cyberespionage (59 percent), advanced persistent threats (57 percent) and cryptomining (56 percent). For 2024, currently trending cyberthreats are primarily supply chain attacks (6.8 percent) and targeted phishing attempts (5.1 percent) which remain a clear and present threat for businesses.

Based on the same 2023 statistics, the most prolific target by threat actors was governments (27.9 percent), financial institutions (12.2 percent), manufacturing (17 percent) and IT companies (8.8 percent).

In terms of targeted regions, Asia and CIS saw the most cybersecurity incidents at (47.3 percent) followed by the Americas (21.8 percent), the Middle East (10.9 percent) and Europe (9.1 percent).

“Governments were the most prolific target by threat actors followed distantly by manufacturing and financial institutions with the largest cyberthreat risk being ransomware and cyber sabotage,” said Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team Director Igor Kuznetsov.