Cyberattacks Using Exploits up by 25 Percent in 2016

A new report released by Kaspersky Lab shows that the number of cyber-attacks using flaws in software increased by nearly 25 percent, to over 702 million attempts last year.

There were 702,026,084 attempts to launch an exploit in 2016 alone, according to the report that also showed that 347,966 users were attacked with exploits in 2016.

The number of corporate users encountering an exploit increased by 28.35 percent, totaling in at 690,557 users. Applications most often exploited were browsers, the Windows and Android operating systems and Microsoft Office.

While the number of corporate users increased drastically, private users who encountered an exploit attack decreased significantly by over 20 percent- from 5.4 million users in 2015 to 4.3 million in 2016.

Researchers have concluded that this is due in part to some of the most popular exploits leaving the underground in 2016, including the Neutrino and Angler exploit kits. This heavily impacted the overall exploit threat landscape as many cybercriminal groups seemingly lost their ability to spread the malware.

Any server deployed in its default state will naturally be lacking in even basic security defenses. This leaves the system vulnerable to compromise. In order to mitigate potential exploits, it is vital that servers are hardened.

All governance, regulatory and compliance standards such as NIST SP 800-53, SOX, NERC CIP, ISO27001, PCI DSS, DISA STIG and HIPAA all call for strong cybersecurity defenses, with a hardened build standard at the core. NNT Change Tracker is one of an elite group of products certified by the Center for Internet Security to deliver an accurate CIS Hardening Checklist audit of server and database platforms.

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