The success of ransomware attacks in 2020 revealed that merely encrypting data and holding it hostage wasn’t quite evil enough.
Threat actors discovered that even organizations with the best backups still are willing to pay big money to prevent sensitive data being leaked to the world, turning ransomware attacks into a hybrid hostage-extortion crisis.
The Sophos 2021 Threat Report covers topic areas into which Sophos has gained insight from the work over the past 12 months by SophosLabs on malware and spam analysis, and by the Sophos Rapid Response, Cloud Security, and Data Science teams.
Who is this report for? It is for anyone in a leadership or operational issue, directly or indirectly, impacted by cybersecurity trends in 2020, and concerned about escalating cybersecurity issues.
This report is segmented into four main parts:
- Discussion of how ransomware has transformed itself, and where this threat is headed;
- analysis of the most common attacks large organizations face, and why these metaphorical canaries in the coal mine remain significant threats;
- how the emergence of a global pandemic affected information security in 2020; and
- a survey of the scope of attacks targeting platforms not traditionally considered part of an enterprise's attack surface.
Click here to download to find useful details of how cybercriminals are turning software that businesses may already use behind networks against the very organisations it is meant to protect –hiding in plain sight from the IT security team.
More important, it offers guidance on what enterprises can do to fortify their cybersecurity strategies through a better understanding of attack surfaces and tactics, and on where they should direct their efforts to defend networks and endpoints in the coming year.
