Last Updated on March 3, 2020
It’s time to publish the statistics derived from the cyber attacks timelines of January 2020 (Part I and Part II). This month I have collected a total of 151 event, a value essentially in line with December 2019 (157 events).
The Daily Trend of Events shows a predictable slow start at the beginning of the year, a spike of activity in the second week, and two additional minor spikes in the third and fourth weeks.
Unsurprisingly, cyber crime leads the Motivations Behind Attacks chart with a value, but its value shows a light decrease (80.8%), compared to December 2019 (85.4%). Cyber Espionage falls back to values similar to November 2019 (8.6% vs 11.5% recorded in December 2019), whilst Cyber Warfare and Hacktivism record respectively 4.6%, and 4.0%. The combined 8.6% is probably the result of the tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
Ransomware keeps the malware category steadily on top of the Attack Techniques chart, but the percentage drops to 35.1% from 44.6% in December 2019. Account hijackings are still at number two with nearly the same value of December 2019 (15.2% vs 15.9%), while targeted attacks are still at number three but their values jumps to 12.6% from 8.9%.
Attacks against governments and multiple targets lead the Distribution of Targets chart with 16.2% (against respectively 15.9% and 12.1% in December 2019), followed by single individuals (12.3%) and and healthcare (10.4%).
As always bear in mind that the sample refers exclusively to the attacks included in my timelines, which can’t obviously complete, and only aims to provide an high level overview of the threat landscape.
Finally, please support my work, sharing the content, and of course follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates. Also feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
