While Trojan viruses were last year’s top consumer threat, a sharp rise in cryptojacking and infostealing led ReasonLabs to deem 2021 as ‘the year of the miner.’
ReasonLabs, a leading cybersecurity company providing enterprise-grade protection to users all around the world, has today published its State of Consumer Cybersecurity 202 HYPERLINK “https://reasonlabs.com/research/cybersecurity-report”2, which details the top cybersecurity threats that consumers faced in 2021. The inaugural report is comprised of detection data derived from ReasonLabs users, who are located in over 180 countries around the world.
Researchers from ReasonLabs’ industry-leading research arm, the Threat Intelligence Center (TIC), found that consumers faced numerous types of advanced threats on virtually every possible endpoint. Trojan viruses were the most prevalent, with Adware and Miners rounding out the top three. Threats coming from phishing documents related to COVID-19 still found their way to users in 2021, most of them occurring in Microsoft Office documents with macros.
Key findings:
- 2021 was the year of the miner. 58.40% of all Trojans detected last year were coin miners.
- The top five consumer ransomware threats were: WannaCry (40%), Cerber (20%), GandCrab (15%), Locky (10%), and LockBit (5%).
- Office Documents weaponization made up 30% of all behavioral detections, with LOLBins (20%), Scripts (13%), PowerShell (12%), and Obfuscation (15%) rounding out the top five.
- The top 10 most attacked countries, by average detection per user, include the United States, Russia, Brazil, China, and Poland, among others.
- The top detection categories were: Trojans (31.95%), Adware (28.60%), Miners (13.63%), Viruses & Worms (13.14%), PUPs (6.18%), HackUtilities (4.76%), and Ransomware (1.73%).
- Phishing threats leveraging ‘COVID-19’ were most prevalent in the following 5 countries: the United States, Poland, Colombia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
“Our research highlights just how critical it is for consumers to be protected across all endpoints,” said Kobi Kalif, General Manager of ReasonLabs. “Malware does not discriminate between large enterprise organizations or consumers using devices at home. Consumers must have access to next-generation AI-powered solutions like RAV Endpoint Protection (EDR). That is why ReasonLabs is democratizing enterprise-grade cybersecurity protection.”
Looking ahead, ReasonLabs researchers predict for 2022 that infostealers, coin miners and cryptojackers, and ransomware will be the top threats consumers face this year. They also predict more targeting of the most unsecured consumers, such as teens and tweens, who are highly connected and starting to more widely use cryptocurrencies, buying into the metaverse and other digital assets.
ReasonLabs’ Threat Intelligence Center (TIC), plays a leading role in exploring cyber threats and advancing intelligence capabilities in cybersecurity. As they operate on a very high scale, their team of defense experts is dedicated to exploring malware elimination and sharing the latest findings with the research community, ensuring everyone is protected from all-immersive threats.
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