2021 Cyber Attacks Statistics

And finally I have aggregated all the data collected in 2021 from the cyber attacks timelines. In the past year I have collected 2539 events, meaning nearly a 9% increase compared with the 2332 events collected over the course of 2020. Interestingly this increase occurred mainly between January and May (maybe an effect of the pandemic), after this interval, the trend is essentially in line with the values of 2020.

Cyber crime continues to lead the Motivations chart with 84.1%, a value in line with 86% of 2020. Even the percentage of Cyber Espionage is in line with the previous year (10.4% vs 10%). The difference is probably in the number of events where the motivation was not clear: during 2021 many vulnerabilities were generically “exploited in the wild” without specifying if the exploitation was carried out by cyber criminals or sate-sponsored actors.

Malware continues to lead the Attack Techniques chart with  39.4% very close to 39.9% recorded over the course of 2020. What is interesting to notice, is the jump of the impact of vulnerabilities from 5% to 10.7% during 2020.

Finally, multiple industries lead the Target Distribution chart with 20.7%, even in this case a value that is substantially in line with 2020 when it was 19.6%. Despite the pandemic, the ransomware gangs focused their unwelcome attentions on the healthcare target, and this probably explain the jump of this sector at rank number two with 11.9%.

The statistics are also available as an infographic.