Cyberattacks have seen a significant increase in 2022, primarily due to the increase in the number of organizations going virtual to combat the effects of the Covid-XNUMX pandemic and the rise of smaller and more diligent hacker and ransomware sets, suggests new research.
A Check Point Research (CPR) report states that, year after year, the number of cyberattacks has increased by more than a third (thirty-eight%).
Hackers, who are also growing in number, primarily target educational institutions shifting to e-learning models, healthcare organizations (who have been extremely busy with the Covid-XNUMX pandemic), and endpoints (opens in a new tab ) belonging to government companies. . In addition to this, software vendors that create solutions for remote environments, such as online communication and cooperation tools, have also come under attack.
hard hit africa
The fourth quarter of the year was the busiest for hackers, with an all-time high of XNUMX average weekly attacks per organization.
Africa was the most affected (XNUMX weekly attacks per company), followed by the Asia-Pacific area (XNUMX). Meanwhile, the greatest development was observed in North America (XNUMX% year-on-year), Latin America (XNUMX%) and Europe (XNUMX%).
The US saw a XNUMX% increase in total cyberattacks this year, the UK XNUMX% and Singapore XNUMX%.
“Many educational institutions were unwilling to make the sudden shift to e-learning, which led to many opportunities for hackers to infiltrate networks by any means necessary,” said Omer Dembinsky, dataset manager at CPR. .
"Schools and universities also have the unique challenge of dealing with children or young adults, many of whom use their devices, work from shared locations, and often connect to public Wi-Fi without thinking about the security implications." .
Unfortunately, scholars are not expecting things to get better in the future, but are expecting things to get worse, thanks to the rise of ChatGPT and other AI-based solutions.
"Unfortunately, we expect the rise in cyberattack activity to continue to increase. With AI technologies like ChatGPT readily available to the public, hackers are likely to produce malicious code and emails at a faster, more automated rate," Dembinsky said. .
Companies should change the way they think about cybersecurity, the researchers concluded, saying they should focus on on-site prevention of detection.