I have aggregated the statistics created from the cyber attacks timelines published in the third quarter of 2023. In total I have collected 1108 events (12.18 events/day), a 6.5% increase compared to the 1040 events of the previous quarter.

Cyber crime continues to lead the Motivations chart and its percentage grows to 79.7% from 76.8%. On the other hand, events driven by Cyber Espionage decrease slightly to 9.7% from 10.2% of the previous quarter.

Malware continues to lead the Attack Techniques chart with a value very close to the previous quarter (33.8% vs 33% down from 38.7% of the previous quarter.) It is important to point out that the real numbers could be much higher since in too many cases unconfirmed ransomware attacks are indicated as generic outages, and they fall into the Unknown category). But the effects of the massive exploitation of the MOVEit CVE-2023-34362 vulnerability caused a major shakeup in this chart, pushing events driven by the exploitation of vulnerabilities at rank number two among the known techniques with 25.5%, up from 16.3% from 10.8% of the previous quarter (but once again, it is worth to mention that the two attack vectors are tightly related since, the exploitation of vulnerabilities is aimed, in almost all cases, to install malware.

The Target Distribution chart confirms Multiple industries at the first place with 17.9%, nearly one point down from 19% of the previous quarter, followed by organizations in the healthcare and financial sectors, particularly targeted by ransomware gangs and hit severely by the exploitation at scale of the MOVEit vulnerability.

The statistics are also available as an infographic.