In this report, we explore the big names in ransomware, the most frequently targeted sectors, trends in data exfiltration, and which malware and tools are leveraged by ransomware operators. This data creates insights into how organizations can better protect their environments from cyberattacks. The 2023 threat landscape was characterized by a combination of mainstay threat actors and new or reemerging groups. While top variants continue evolving to maintain dominance, the widespread impact of newer groups demonstrates the constant evolution of today’s threats and the need for adaptable defenses and increased cyber resilience.

Dragos started the Year in Review to highlight significant trends in the OT cybersecurity community. This year’s report aims to go further by offering practitioners and leaders the most up-to-date data, along with perspectives from the field, to help them better defend critical infrastructure around the world. These perspectives are focused on providing actionable insights that have been tried and tested to help organizations effectively defend against and respond to industrial cyber threats.

This iteration of the Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report provides a forward-thinking view of cloud security with intelligence on emerging threats and actionable recommendations from Google’s security experts. This report explores top cloud threats and security concerns for 2024, including credential abuse, crypto-mining, ransomware, and data theft.

Ransomware groups exploit vulnerabilities in two distinct categories: those targeted by only a few groups and those widely exploited by several. Each category necessitates different defense strategies. Groups targeting specific vulnerabilities tend to follow particular patterns, enabling companies to prioritize defenses and audits. To defend against unique exploitation, understanding the likely targets and vulnerability types is crucial. Looking ahead to 2024, advancements in generative AI may lower the technical barrier for cybercriminals, facilitating the exploitation of more zero-day vulnerabilities.

When you overlap Resilience’s claims data with data from ransomware incident response partner Coveware, blockchain analytics firm Chainanalysis, security partner Zscaler, and security firm Sophos, it reveals five key findings that impact both network defenders and the cyber insurance industry at large.

The report explores a notable shift towards instability within the threat landscape and an increase in unnamed ransomware variants, potentially due to affiliates shifting between names to find the highest profits while reducing exposure to law enforcement. It also explores trends in ransom demands and payments across various industries. Finally, we discuss what may be coming in Q4 as the ransomware ecosystem continues to shift.

As the findings in this report show, these attacks are also having a greater impact, adding to pressure on security leaders to choose the right solutions and keep the entire environment safe, without sacrificing overall performance or innovation. The 1,200 respondents agreed overwhelmingly on the effectiveness of segmentation in keeping assets protected, but their overall progress in deploying it around critical business applications and assets was lower than expected.

Coalition’s 2023 Cyber Claims Report: Mid-year Update features data from organizations across the United States. Cyber risk is global in nature, and we believe the trends and risk mitigation strategies within this report are applicable regardless of location. We’re proud to share these insights to help our policyholders, broker partners, and others in the cyber insurance industry stay informed about the ever changing threat landscape.

As the third annual study of Data Protection Trends, this year’s survey was designed to quantify the shifts in overall concerns/goals and strategies for data protection, as well as gain an understanding of the current market landscape on data protection, disaster recovery, cybersecurity/ransomware and containers.

Axio researchers analyzed updated data from the Axio360 Ransomware Preparedness Assessment tool to prepare the 2022 State of Ransomware Preparedness report (2022 Study). The Ransomware Preparedness Assessment is informed by input from hundreds of ransomware events, guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Axio’s own research. Organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors have used the tool to determine the strength of their ransomware practices and controls, to identify gaps, and to prioritize improvements.

In the first half of 2023, Arete observed several distinct trends and shifts in the cyber threat landscape. Leveraging the data collected during each incident response engagement, we can see the rise and fall of ransomware variants, notable trends in ransom demands and payments, industries targeted by ransomware attacks, and what may be coming next. The threat landscape continues to evolve with the widespread introduction of AI tools, lower barriers of entry into cybercrime, new vulnerabilities, and the socioeconomic effects of the Russia-Ukraine war.

In this report, Halcyon demonstrates a unique method for identifying C2P entities that can potentially be used to forecast the precursors of ransomware campaigns and other attacks significantly “left of boom.” The ransomware economy is supported by a number of illicit groups that each provide one small piece of the puzzle that is cybercrime. From initial access brokers (IABs) to crypto money launderers, the criminal ecosystem that has sprung up around ransomware is vast.

We lay out the ransomware landscape in this State of the Internet (SOTI) report by exploring some of the most effective attack techniques and tools that ransomware groups are utilizing to achieve initial access through exfiltration. We also provide an extensive list of safeguarding techniques and recommendations. It is crucial that both industries and individuals protect themselves from the new wave of ransomware attacks, and this report will help provide insights for better defense and risk management of this growing concern.

In this report, we dive into measuring engagement, along with the most popular content types, and a roundup of the events that resonated most with audiences, offering key marketing takeaways on everything from intent topics to what has generated the most engagement through Q3 2022. We have also highlighted the brands generating the most engagement from their content marketing efforts. And we factor in how newsworthy cybersecurity events impact audience engagement, and content preferences.

This report has been put together using CISA’s KEV Catalog and the month-on-month analysis that CSW’s researchers have delivered to our customers for the past year. Our researchers used the NVD, MITRE, and other repositories to map each vulnerability to Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) to understand the actual risk posed by these vulnerabilities. We cross-referenced the KEVs with our ransomware and threat groups’ database maintained in Securin Vulnerability Intelligence (VI) to provide additional threat context to the KEV Catalog. We have also used our proprietary threat intelligence platform (Securin VI) to predict and recommend vulnerabilities that need to be a part of the KEV Catalog.

As health care delivery organizations have increased their reliance on health information technology, they have also increased their exposure to new cybersecurity risks, such as ransomware attacks.

In our annual Threat Report, the Deepwatch Adversary Tactics and Intelligence (ATI) team provides data on the leading cybersecurity threats that SOC security analysts faced in 2022, and offers predictions of what teams will likely face in 2023. With analysis from ATI research and Deepwatch customer engagements, we review the types of volumes of threats, look at the challenges in visualization and identification, and consider what lingering or growing threats SOC teams should prioritize.

This report aims to take a look at the times when things did not work as intended—not to point fingers but to help us all learn and improve. In a time where almost everyone, corporations and individuals alike, is looking at ways to do more with less, we believe a close analysis of when our defenses failed can be very beneficial. While times of great change are always challenging, they often also prompt us to take stock of our situation and, if necessary, refocus both our viewpoint and our energies. Such is the case with the DBIR this year. As a team, we decided to take a step back toward the fundamental things that got us where we are, an intense focus on actual data breaches analyzed using our own VERIS Framework. And speaking of VERIS, one of the new goodies this refocusing brings is an even better mapping between VERIS and MITRE ATT&CK through a collaboration with MITRE Ingenuity and the Center for Threat Informed Defense (CTID).

The research revealed that the rate of ransomware attacks has remained level, with 66% of respondents reporting that their organization was hit by ransomware in the previous year, the same as in our 2022 survey. With adversaries now able to consistently execute attacks at scale, ransomware is arguably the biggest cyber risk facing organizations today.

With a steady increase in cyberattacks each year and a constantly evolving threat landscape, more organizations are turning their attention to building long-term cyber resilience: the ability of the workforce to adapt, respond, and recover from cybersecurity incidents, not merely the ability to detect and prevent them. To learn more about the state of cyber resilience, we surveyed senior security and risk leaders and found that cyber resilience indeed tops their list of strategic and spending priorities for organizations in 2023, driven largely by concerns about ransomware, supply chain and third-party attacks, and coding vulnerabilities.

The goal of this paper is to help decision-makers and entities who can protect systems from ransomware at scale, such as the security industry, governments, and policymakers, to form defensive strategies on how best to make an impact on the ransomware ecosystem. While this paper does not focus on hands-on technical defenses that an enterprise would look to for deployment, it does aim to provide decision-makers with methods for understanding the level of risk that an organization faces from this threat.