The Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) team, backed by the world\u2019s largest commercial threat intelligence organization, has released its quarterly Threat Assessment Report. Cisco Talos observed a variety of attacks, with ransomware being the quarter\u2019s most dominant threat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to CTIR, ransomware accounted for almost half\u00a0of all incidents, and more than triple that of the next most common threat.\u00a0\u00a0Actors targeted a broad range of verticals, including transportation, utilities, health care, government, telecoms, technology, machinery, chemical distribution, manufacturing, education, real estate, and agriculture. However, healthcare was targeted the most out of all verticals for the third quarter in a row, with the government is the second most targeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Commenting on Talos\u2019s\u00a0Threat Assessment Report, Fady Younes, Cybersecurity Director at Cisco Middle East and Africa said:\u00a0\u201cThere are many reasons why actors are continuing to target the health care industry, including the COVID-19 pandemic incentivizing victims to pay to restore services as quickly as possible. On a positive note, there were several pre-ransomware events in which timely detection via Cisco Secure products, along with quick remediation led to the containment of the incident before encryption could occur.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ransomware actors used\u00a0commercial tools like\u00a0Cobalt Strike, open-source tools, and tools native to the victim\u2019s device.\u00a0Other observed threats included the exploitation of known vulnerabilities, cryptocurrency mining, and account compromise. Interestingly, there were multiple incidents involving trojanized USB drives, which is an older attack vector not seen in many years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) remains one of the biggest impediments to enterprise security. CTIR frequently observes ransomware incidents that could have been prevented if MFA had been enabled on critical services. CTIR urges organizations to implement MFA wherever possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) team, backed by the world\u2019s largest commercial threat intelligence organization, has released its quarterly Threat Assessment Report. Cisco Talos observed a variety of attacks, with ransomware being the quarter\u2019s most dominant threat. According to CTIR, ransomware accounted for almost half\u00a0of all incidents, and more than triple that of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":27261,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_pr_autopilot_social_copy":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph_description":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph_image":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph_image_id":0,"_yoast_wpseo_twitter_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter_description":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter_image":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter_image_id":0,"_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":22,"_extra_hide_author_box":"","_extra_featured_post":"0","_partner_post_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecom","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n