Cisco has released its 2014 Annual Security Report

Jan 20, 2014 21:51 GMT  ·  By

According to Cisco’s latest Annual Security Report, this year, there’s a shortage of over one million security experts across the globe. The company says cybercriminals have sophisticated tactics and technology, which makes it very difficult to defend an organization against their constant attacks.

The study also shows that the number of vulnerability and threat alerts has increased by 14% compared to 2012. In fact, this represents an all-time high since May 2000.

After analyzing the networks of 30 of the world’s largest multinational organizations, the company has determined that all of them generated visitor traffic to malware websites. In addition, 96% of the monitored networks sent out traffic to compromised servers.

As far as distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks are concerned, they’ve increased not only in volume, but also in severity.

Up until recently, the electronics manufacturing, pharmaceutical and chemical industries had been most targeted in malware attacks. However, over the past couple of years, the agriculture and mining industry became increasingly targeted. Previously, it was considered a relatively low-risk sector.

When it comes to malware in general, experts found that 27% of all the threats encountered in 2013 were multipurpose Trojans. The second position is occupied by malicious scripts (23%), followed by infostealers (22%).

“Although the Cisco Annual Security Report paints a grim picture of the current state of cyber security, there is hope for restoring trust in people, institutions and technologies – and that starts with empowering defenders with real-world knowledge about expanding attack surfaces,” said Cisco’s John N. Stewart.

“To truly protect against all of these possible attacks, defenders must understand the attackers, their motivations and their methods – before, during and after an attack.”

Cisco’s Annual Security Report is available on the company’s website (registration required).