CrowdStrike has released its 2018 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report: Blurring the Lines Between Statecraft and Tradecraft.
The report analyzes comprehensive threat data from CrowdStrike Falcon® Intelligence™, CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™, the company’s industry-leading managed hunting team, and the CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, a massively scalable, cloud-based graph database technology processing nearly 100 billion events a day across 176 countries.
In addition to detailing key trends driving adversary targeting and a deep dive into the key factors shaping the targeted intrusion campaigns of notable nation-state adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc., the report brings to light key metrics defining the state of cybersecurity today across industries.
“We’ve already seen how cybercriminals can come up with massive, destructive attacks that render organizations inoperable for days or weeks. Looking ahead, security teams will be under even more pressure to detect, investigate, and remediate breaches fast,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “Based on CrowdStrike’s comprehensive visibility into threat actors and data from our global customer community, we are able to deliver real-time insights into threat activity, enabling customers to fortify threat prevention and improve their security postures.”
Notable Highlights of the Global Threat Report:
- In 2017, 39 percent of all attacks that CrowdStrike observed constituted malware-free intrusions that were not detected by traditional antivirus, with the manufacturing, professional services and pharmaceutical industries facing the most malware-free attacks.
- CrowdStrike Threat Graph data indicates that it takes an intruder an average of one hour and 58 minutes to begin moving laterally to other systems in the network.
- The propagation of advanced exploits has blurred the lines between statecraft and tradecraft, evolving the threat landscape beyond the defense capabilities of conventional security measures.
- Extortion and weaponization of data have become mainstream among cybercriminals, heavily impacting government and healthcare, among other sectors.
- Nation-state-linked attacks and targeted ransomware are on the rise and could be used for geopolitical and even militaristic exploitation purposes.
- Supply chain compromises and crypto fraud and mining will present new attack vectors for both state-sponsored and eCrime actors.
Established and well-resourced cyber operations will continue to innovate, developing new methods of distributing crimeware and incorporating advanced tactics to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy systems. CrowdStrike is the only company that unifies strategic and tactical intelligence with an industry-leading managed hunting practice and unrivalled threat visibility, establishing an unprecedented view of the global threat landscape.
“Today, the lines between nation-states and eCrime actors are increasingly blurring, elevating the sophistication of threats to a new level. Actionable threat intelligence and real-time threat data are crucial in empowering better security and executive decisions,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. “ With the Global Threat Report, public and private sector organizations can be better informed about the employed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and properly allocate the defenses and resources necessary to protect assets that are most at risk.”
