International. The increase in malicious and ransomware attacks in 2021 are part of the findings of the SonicWall study. It ensures that the frequency and variety of cyberattacks continues to expand, while SMEs and large companies are threatened at an increasing cost.
The company's president and CEO, Bill Cornner, said, "Cyberattacks become more attractive and potentially more disastrous as our reliance on information technology increases."
Rise of ransomware
SonicWall researchers detected a 109% increase in ransomwere attacks, accumulating the number of 318.6 million incidents, rates of 2021 compared to 2020. In that sense, high-profile ransomware attacks affected companies, state and federal governments, education, hospitals, but also individuals, in general this action harmed supply chains.
Globally, all industries faced a notable increase in the volume of data hijacking: government suffered an increase of 1,885%, health care 755%, education 152%, and retail with 21% was the least affected of these.
Colombia and Mexico were among the top 10 countries with ransomware attacks, but in Latin America it was Brazil that took the most attacks of this type, in addition to a 61.14% increase in malware attacks compared to the previous period.
Different cyber threats
Apache vulnerabilities recorded 142.2 million explosion attempts. Malware fell 22% in the first half of 2021, marking the third consecutive year of reduction and the lowest in seven years. However, the increase in these attacks during the second half of 2021, thus leaving a total decrease for 2021 to only 4%. Which suggests there may be an even higher rate of malware in 2022.
Encrypted threats increased by 167%. In August 2021, encrypted attacks surpassed the 1 million mark for the first time, reaching around 2.5 million by the end of the year. In that order of ideas, cryptojacking increased by 19% worldwide reaching 97.1 million assaults.
Finally, the malware of the IoT family increased only 6%, which is a figure that generates a positive surprise, since in 2019 the increase was 218% and in 2020 of 66%, more taking into account the exponential growth of devices connected through the Internet of Things. This, according to the report, suggests that attack volumes may be stabilizing.
