Industrial organizations always attract attention from both cybercriminals and politically-motivated threat actors. Reflecting on the previous half year, we have seen among other findings, growth in the number of cyberespionage and malicious credential stealing campaigns. Their success has most likely been the main factor raising the ransomware threat to such [...]
Industrial organizations always attract attention from both cybercriminals and politically-motivated threat actors.
Reflecting on the previous half year, we have seen among other findings, growth in the number of cyberespionage and malicious credential stealing campaigns. Their success has most likely been the main factor raising the ransomware threat to such a high degree, and I see no reason why some of the APT groups won’t benefit from these credential stealing campaigns as well.
said Evgeny Goncharov, security expert at Kaspersky.
The internet was the main source of threats causing these increases.
The internet, removable media and email continue to be the main sources of threats to computers in ICS environments.
In H1 2021, the largest increases of this indicator were observed in Belarus (+12.2 p.p.), Ukraine (+8 p.p.) and Russia (+6.7 p.p.)
Russia headed this rating among regions with 27.6% and Belarus among individual countries with 32.8%.
Africa leads noticeably amidst regional rankings with 15.6%, and Algeria leads among individual countries with 24%.
In H1 2021 the percentage of ICS computers on which threats were blocked when removable media were connected to them decreased in Asian regions.
Southern Europe was the highest ranked region for this indicator with 6.4%, while Bangladesh led among individual countries with 8.8%.
The only region where the percentage increased was Australia and New Zealand (+1.3 p.p.)
In H1 2021 Kaspersky security solutions blocked over 20.1 thousand malware variants from 5,150 families in ICS environments.
Threat actors use malicious scripts on various media resources and sites hosting pirated content. These scripts redirect users to websites that spread spyware and/or cryptocurrency miners. The percentage of computers where such threats have been blocked has been growing since 2020.
Australia and New Zealand (+3.8 p.p.), as well as Russia (+4.4 p.p.) saw a noticeable growth in the percentage of computers where malicious downloader scripts used for downloading spyware were blocked.
This indicator was highest in East Asia (14.3%), Africa (13.4%) and Southeast Asia (11.2%).
This indicator is highest in East Asia with 0.82%.
In the Middle East we saw an increase in the percentage of computers on which worms (+0.4 p.p.) and ransomware (+0.3 p.p.) were blocked.
Read the full ICS threat landscape report from Kaspersky
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