A report by Atlas VPN research team appears to blame the shift to remote work for the large volume of cybercrime activities recorded in the first half of 2021, saying the shift to remote work occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic provided a considerably larger attack surface for hackers to exploit.
The report also noted that unpatched personal devices, unprotected home networks, and reduced visibility for the in-house security team are some of the leading security issues, give volume and the sophistication of attacks to grow substantially during the period under review.
Some of the main highlights of the report include blockchain hackers netted over $100 million in Q1 2021 with ransomware accounted for 81% of all financially driven intrusions in 2020. The average cost of a ransomware breach was $4.44 million.
Others highlights include Phishing assaults that affected 83%t of UK firms in the last year; Google discovered a record-high number of phishing websites last year, with over 2.11 million, representing a 25% increase over 2019 and over 5 billion records have already been leaked in 2021.
RDP attacks skyrocketed 241% in 2020. In 2019, the number of RDP attacks was 969 million, but in 2020, threat actors carried out an incredible 3.3 billion attacks and macOS malware development surged by over 1,000% in 2020.
The statistics used by the Atlas VPN research team are based on data from strictly reputable sources, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Trade Commission, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, and many others. You can click on the source of each statistic to explore the full report that includes extended analysis, references, and additional data.