In our country, Trend Micro telemetry detected over 62.37 million attempts at malware infection in twelve months. Published on March 17, 2022 by Redazione
Over 94 billion threats blocked - that's the amount of Cyber Attack work carried out by Trend Micro in 2021. As described in the new annual report, based on telemetry data collected by Trend Micro technologies around the world, the 'last year the volume of malicious, or at least suspicious, files grew by 382% compared to 2020. The numbers, as always, have an effect but do not tell everything, and to understand what year 2021 was we must observe the trends, that is the strong growing attacks on infrastructure and applications for remote work, attacks often made possible by software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of cloud resources.
Furthermore, cybercrime has continued to structure itself more and more as a "supply chain", with actors specialized in the theft and resale of access credentials, which are then purchased and exploited by other groups. Although one in four vulnerabilities sold in the cybercrime market is at least three years old, 2021 was also a record year in terms of the number of new vulnerabilities that emerged.
Among the most widespread families of malware, in the ranking are the cryptocurrency miners, first of all, and then the Web shells and the Ulise trojan, but also the well-known WannaCry ransomware. Speaking of ransomware, Trend Micro discovered 78 new "families" in 2021, up 39% over 2020.
It is not a pleasure to discover that Italy ranked fourth in the world (after the much more populous United States, Japan and India) and first in Europe in the list of countries most affected by malware. The total number of malicious programs intercepted was over 62.37 million, more than double the 22.64 million in 2021. And we are also the fourth most affected European country by ransomware, after Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In the twelve months of 2021, Trend Micro technologies have also detected in Italy more than 336 million threats transmitted via email, over 269 thousand malicious websites with an Italian domain and over 51 thousand malicious applications downloaded. 3,478 unique online banking malware was intercepted.
malware