BlackBerry stopping one cyber attack per minute

BlackBerry’s AI-driven security technology stopped 1,757,248 malware-based cyber attacks between the start of September and the end of November last year, equating to around one attack every minute, the company has revealed.

Around 4% of the attacks identified and stopped by the company’s Threat Research and Intelligence team were from Australia, making it the equal fifth targeted nation after the US (65%), Japan (8%), Brazil (6%) and Canada (5%), and on par with Mexico (4%), a report published by the team shows.

Australia also made the list of the top 10 countries that were most frequently attacked by unique malware samples, at 4%.

The most common cyber weapons being used include the Emotet botnet and the Qakbot phishing threat, which hijacks existing email threads to convince victims of their legitimacy.

Other emerging threats include the increase in infostealer downloaders like GuLoader, the report found. This trend is being driven by the increased need to access internal networks from the outside due to the rise of remote and hybrid work following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another theme of the report was that no platform is safe from attack. Despite the prevailing opinion, macOS is not a safer platform, with malware and vulnerabilities targeting the operating system proliferating, the report states.

There has also been an increasing number of attacks against Linux platforms, while less mainstream programming languages like GoLang are being used to develop cross-platform malware, BlackBerry said.

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