Most cyber intrusions lead to follow-up attacks

More than two-thirds of organisations that fell victim to an intrusion in 2020 experienced an additional intrusion attempt, according to the latest annual CrowdStrike Services Cyber Front Lines Report.

Based on an analysis of CrowdStrike’s global incident response and proactive services teams in 2020, the report found that intrusions are no longer a one-time event.

Among customers who had experienced an intrusion before leveraging CrowdStrike to manage their endpoint protection efforts, 68% experienced another intrusion attempt, which was prevented.

Meanwhile, the report found that misconfigured security software leaves organisations exposed. In at least 30% of incident response engagements, CrowdStrike found that the target organisation’s antivirus solutions were either incorrectly configured with weak prevention settings or not fully deployed across the environment.

Antivirus protection also failed to prevent an intrusion in 40% of incidents, in which either malware was undetected or a portion of the attack sequence was missed by antivirus tools.

The report also found a “staggering increase” in the volume and velocity of financially motivated attacks as many organisations were forced to rapidly adapt to remote work during COVID-19.

Of these, 81% involved the deployment of ransomware, while only 19% included e-crime attacks such as point-of-sale intrusions, e-commerce website attacks, business email compromise and cryptocurrency mining.

“Remote work has redefined the playing field between cyber attackers and defenders, and that’s clearly demonstrated in the CrowdStrike Services Cyber Front Lines Report. Corporate networks now span both office and home, providing a wealth of new attack surfaces and vectors that adversaries can exploit,” CrowdStrike Services CSO and President Shawn Henry said.

“Holistic coordination and continued vigilance are key in detecting and stopping sophisticated intrusions. Because of this, we’re seeing a necessary shift from one-off emergency engagements to continuous monitoring and response.”

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