Cybercrime
Phishing emails often spike around this time of year.
Right before the holidays.
These nations comprise the Big Four nation state cyber attackers.
Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran
Under the increasingly common "double extortion business model," ransomware attacks will do this in addition to encrypting a victim's data.
Exfiltrate particularly sensitive data and threaten to publish it online.
This was the main goal of nation state cyber actors in 2021.
Espionage/intelligence gathering
On average, organizations that paid a ransom to cyber criminals got back this percentage of their data.
65%
These kinds of attacks are uncommon for nation state cyber actors, often only used to cover the attackers tracks.
Ransomware attacks.
This is the average cost of 1,000 stolen username/password pairs.
97 cents
In a "revolutionary change" in 2021, the Big Four nation state cyber programs began targeting this type of company to more successfully exploit victims downstream
IT service providers
This is a security framework that requires all users to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before being granted or keeping access to applications and data.
Zero-trust
After government entities, these were the most common victims of nation state attacks in 2021, comprising 31% of all attacks
NGOs and think tanks