Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2019

104
New Security Report Highlights Trends in Mid-Market Business
Malware
By Emil Hozan, Security Analyst, WatchGuard Technologies
As the security landscape continues to grow and shift, WatchGuard’s Threat Lab research team
continues to offer insights into the latest malware and network attacks with its quarterly Internet Security
Report (ISR). This edition of the report covers the top cyber threats affecting midmarket businesses in
the second quarter of 2019 and is based on anonymized network telemetry data from tens of thousands
of WatchGuard appliances deployed around the world. It includes both bulk data from Q2 2019 – for
example showing there was a slight decrease in malware variants (to approximately 22.6 million total)
and a more than doubling of network attacks (to approximately 2.2 million total) – and a variety of other
critical security insights and trends for the midmarket.
From new types of malware, to a spike in SQL injection attacks, to malware campaigns hiding malicious
content on legitimate Content Delivery Networks like CloudFront and SharePoint, let’s dig into some of
the key insights and trends from the latest report.
Quarterly Malware Decreases, Year Over Year Increases, and New Malware Variants Emerge
Overall, malware detections decreased by 5% in Q2 from Q1, but were still up 64% over the previous
year. In addition, zero day malware attacks – unique malware attacks where a signature does not already
exist – accounted for 38% of all malware detections, which was within a few percentage points of the