PandaLabs Annual Report and 2019 Predictions

2017 was the year when the word ransomware stopped being a term exclusive to cybersecurity experts and IT departments. The enormous media attention that attacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya received turned this type of threat into one of the key trends for businesses last year.
This year, the constant evolution of cyberthreats have not slowed, Cybercriminals continue to change their tactics: instead of the headline-grabbing of last year, we are seeing sneakier tactics such as cryptojacking.
Cryptojacking is hijacking devices to mine cryptocurrencies, and go unnoticed for as long as possible to keep exploiting victim’s processing power to mine.
PandaLabs detected a 60% rise throughout 2018 - up to 9 million malicious URLs and 2.4 million attacks blocked per million endpoints per month. 20.7% of machines experienced at least one malware attack.
Yet despite this increase in malware, the number of incidents escalated to PandaLabs is trending to zero, due to the 100% classification of processes and active Threat-Hunting in Panda Security Endpoint Detection and Response solutions.
Malware-less attacks targeting the endpoint such as Business Email Compromise and utilizing Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to infiltrate the network are becoming more prevalent, with RDP attacks on 70% of mid to large sized Panda clients every month.
Panda Security’s Threat Hunting and Investigation Service has identified and investigated 90 new valid incident types resulting from interrogating the forensic data to validate their hypotheses.
What can we expect to see next year?
While 2018 has been an interesting year for cybersecurity, PandaLabs predictions for 2019 suggest it will be anything other than a “tock” year geopolitical digital sovereignty, supply chain attacks, hackers harnessing AI, and the misuse of data all causes for worry.
One of the leading trends in cybersecurity in 2019 will be live hacking. Although “traditional” types of malware, such as Trojans or worms, are still being used frequently by attackers, new malwareless attack techniques will grow at a faster rate.
In 2018, nation states have played a more significant role in the digital realm, as a consequence of the more protectionist positions in the western world (the US and the UK), the reactions of other powers (mainly Russia and China), and the increasing climate of mutual distrust among them. One compelling prediction suggests that the concept of digital sovereignty will also spread to security in 2019, especially in Europe, moving towards a European digital sovereignty.
Find out all the main threat data from this year, together with the most important news, and all our predictions for 2019 in our PandaLabs Annual Report - https://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/pandalabs/annual-cybersecurity-report-2018/