MacOS is not as safe as believed, either, according to one firm’s own telemetry
In its yearly threat intelligent report based on its own global telemetry, one cybersecurity firm has observed that cyber activities are being released at the rate of one every minute.
According to the firm’s incident response and research data, the most common cyber weapons used in attacks include the resurgence of the Emotet botnet after a four-month dormancy period; the extensive presence of the Qakbot phishing threat, and the increase in infostealer downloaders like GuLoader.
Highlights from the report include the following trends:
- MacOS is not immune. The common misconception that macOS is a safer platform due to it being used less among enterprise systems could be lulling IT managers into a false sense of security. In Q4 2022, the firm’s most-seen malicious application on macOS was Dock2Master, which collects users’ data from its own surreptitious ads. Some 34% of the firm’s client organizations using macOS had Dock2Master on their network.
- RedLine was the biggest threat in Q4. The most active and widespread infostealer is capable of stealing credentials from numerous targets including browsers, crypto wallets, and FTP and VPN software, among others. Cybercriminals and state sponsored threat actors rely on initial access brokers trading stolen credentials supplied by malware such as RedLine.
- Rate of malware activity estimate. In Q4 the firm’s AI-driven cybersecurity technology stopped 1,757,248 malware-based attacks and collected 62 unique malware code samples per hour, or one sample each minute.
According to Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President, Threat Research & Intelligence, BlackBerry, the firm releasing the annual threat report, organizations need to make well-informed decisions and take prompt effective actions, using the latest actionable data, so: “BlackBerry has switched to a quarterly cadence to match the speed adversaries evolve to provide a more holistic view of the threat landscape, helping businesses to prepare and protect themselves accordingly.”
