Financially motivated attacks accounted for 85% of all cyberattacks in 2018, according to Secureworks’ 2019 Incident Response Insight Report. 

The report, which brings together the findings of more than a thousand incident response engagements throughout the year, revealed that business email fraud, ransomware, digital currency mining (also known as cryptomining), and banking trojan activities accounted for 70% of financially motivated attacks.

Business email fraud was the leading type of financially motivated incidents, accounting for 22% of attacks. This was followed closely by ransomware (21%) and digital currency mining (18%).

Banking trojans accounted for 12% of financially motivated attacks while spam and adware each accounted for 3% of attacks. Telephone scams and denial of service incidents each represented 2% of attacks. 

“Every organization has something of value such as money, intellectual property, computing resources and personally identifiable information that will attract the attention of threat actors,” said Mahmoud Mounir, Regional Director, Secureworks MEA. “Financially motived criminals try to make money however they can, whether that’s using systems illegally to mine cryptocurrency, by staging ransomware attacks or gaining access to bank accounts to steal money.”

The report from Secureworks found that companies continue to make the same mistakes as in previous years when it comes to cybersecurity. For example, gaps in basic security controls and organizations’ visibility of their own environments continue to allow threat actors to gain access and entrench themselves. 

Secureworks also noted that security implications of adopting new technologies or major changes to networks are not consistently addressed, creating longer-term problems for many organizations.

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