New Cyber Threat Intelligence Suggests Rise in Phishing Attacks

Cyber security company eSentire recently released its 2017 Q2 Quarterly Threat Report, which provides a quarterly snapshot of threat events investigated by the eSentire Security Operations Center (SOC) from April-July of this year.

Among its key findings are an interesting shift in attack methods – from web exploitation to phishing – and an increase in industry-based attacks, specifically targeting industries that house large amounts of lucrative data.  Additional key insights:

* The eSentire SOC detected 4 million attacks across industries between April 1 and June 30.

* Detections in the fraud category (comprised largely of phishing attacks) grew 14 percent this quarter.

* While Q2 saw a wide range of targeted vulnerabilities, the GNU Bash vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) association with the "Shellshock" exploit topped the list, making up 40 percent of the activity.

* The biotechnology and technology industries experienced the largest volume per active internet device in Q2, thanks in part to a high degree of brute force attempts via SSH.