![]() ![]() Since today’s ransomware actors no longer abide by the spray-and-pray ransomware model, the number of attacks are no longer as massive as the number that we witnessed in ransomware’s early days. The reason behind this continuing decline is possibly two-fold: One, unlike legacy ransomware that focuses on the quantity of victims, modern ransomware focuses on waging highly targeted and planned attacks to yield bigger profits. Last year, the Trend Micro Cloud App Security solution detected and blocked 101,215 ransomware files - a 43.4% decrease compared to 2020’s detections. Meanwhile, ransomware detections continued to decline in 2021, a consistent trend that we have been seeing in previous years. QAKBOT operators also resumed their spam campaign in late 2021 after an almost three-month hiatus and abused hijacked email threads to lead victims to both QAKBOT and the SquirrelWaffle malware loader. We also shared an update on APT-C-36 (aka Blind Eagle), an advanced persistent threat (APT) group targeting South American entities using a spam campaign that used fraudulent emails impersonating Colombia’s national directorate of taxes and customs and even fake infidelity email lures. In May last year, we reported on Panda Stealer, an information stealer that targets cryptocurrency wallets and credentials via spam emails. In January, we saw how Emotet sent spam emails that used hexadecimal and octal representations of IP addresses for detection evasion in its delivery of malware such as TrickBot and Cobalt Strike. There were also huge spikes in both known and unknown malware detections in 2021 at 133.8% and 221%, respectively.Ĭybercriminals worked overtime to attach malware in malicious emails in 2021 using advanced tactics and social engineering lures. ![]() More urgently, this number represents an increase of a whopping 196% from 2020’s numbers. The Trend Micro Cloud App Security solution detected and thwarted a total of 3,315,539 total malware files in 2021. Malware detections surge as attacks become more elaborate, targeted In this report, we discuss the notable email threats of 2021 based on the data that we’ve gathered using the Trend Micro™ Cloud App Security, a security solution that supplements the preexisting security features in email and collaboration platforms. Meanwhile, the 2021 Internet Crime Report by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) states that there was “an unprecedented increase in cyberattacks and malicious cyber activity” last year, with business email compromise (BEC) being among the top incidents. At a time when the workplace had already largely shifted from offices to homes, malicious actors continued to favor email as a low-effort yet high-impact attack vector to disseminate malware.Įmail is not only popular among cybercriminals for its simplicity but also for its efficacy. In fact, 74.1% of the total threats blocked by Trend Micro in 2021 are email threats. This was especially true in 2021, when organizations found themselves trying to keep business operations afloat in the middle of a pandemic that has forever changed how people work. Email is an integral cog in the digital transformation machine.
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