Cybercrime has entered the mainstream of our culture to an unprecedented extent and it is here to stay, with the scale of threats today becoming more and more difficult to quantify.
Against this background, organisations need to know as much as possible about the potential attacks they are facing if there is any hope of averting them.
This is according to Hardik Modi, senior director of threat intelligence at NetScout, a leading provider of service assurance, security and business analytics. He says in a blog entry that, “It’s hard to express the scale of today’s cyber threat landscape, let alone its global impact… in the past six months, there were nearly four million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks around the world… attack frequency grew by 39%.”
NetScout products and solutions are distributed throughout Africa by value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited Africa, where Hannes Rheeder, general manager: enterprise systems management, adds, “Visibility into the underbelly of the cyber world is necessary for business today – as the saying goes, forewarned is forearmed. NetScout’s business assurance products are designed to provide end-to-end visibility across physical and virtual environments and deliver actionable intelligence, to – amongst others – improve network performance.
“The use of NetScout’s Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS), which actively monitors the global internet threat landscape, provides visibility into approximately one-third of the global internet. To put this into perspective, the ATLAS Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT) recently saw 20,000 unique samples per month from just one family of IoT malware.”
In his blog, Modi points out some of the highlights outlined in the latest NetScout Threat Intelligence Report (Powered by ATLAS), as follows:
- Under attack within minutes: IoT devices are under attack so fast that it boggles the mind, giving cybercriminals vast access to inexpensive tools that can be turned into devastating weapons.
- Turning your home into an attack hub: Attackers take advantage of IoT devices ranging from smart home sensors to smart phones, routers and even Apple software. On average, 7,7-million IoT devices are connected to the internet every day, many of them with known security issues or with no security at all.
- Geopolitical skirmishes: Sovereign country adversaries are increasingly using cyber tactics against each other. This includes malware, DDoS attacks and social engineering. During the first half of 2019, India and Pakistan became the latest examples of sworn enemies using cyber tactics against each other.
“As threats grow across the landscape, the business need to have access to wide visibility into this constantly changing environment becomes ever-more critical. NetScout assists organisations to make network security data consumable, affordable and above all, effective,” concludes Rheeder.