Each organization in Taiwan on average was targeted by 4,129 cyberattacks per week in the third quarter of this year, the most of any economy in the Asia-Pacific region, cybersecurity service provider Check Point said in a report yesterday.
The total was up 44 percent from the same period a year earlier, a surge that was nonetheless lower than for most other regions around the world, the report said.
The three sectors hit the most in Taiwan during the quarter were hardware vendors, the government and military sector, and manufacturing, which respectively reported 7,046, 5,357 and 4,175 attacks per week on average from May to October, it said.
Photo: Reuters
Check Point did not list other economies within the Asia- Pacific region that faced more attacks in the period.
The Asia-Pacific region had a weekly average of 2,863 attacks, up 55 percent from the same period a year earlier, while the global average of weekly attacks soared 75 percent from the third quarter last year to an all-time high of 1,876, the Check Point data showed.
“The surge underscores the trend that virtual threats are becoming more frequent and sophisticated,” the company said in the report.
The most targeted sectors worldwide were education and research, which received 3,828 weekly attacks per organization on average, followed by the government and military sector at 2,553, and the healthcare sector at 2,434, it said.
The most attacked region globally in the third quarter was Africa, which averaged 3,370 weekly attacks per organization, up 90 percent from the previous year, it said.
Latin America was just behind the Asia-Pacific region with 2,844 weekly attacks on average for the quarter, up 72 percent year-on-year, the report said.
There were generally fewer attacks on organizations in Europe and North America, with 1,557 and 1,298 weekly attacks per organization respectively, up 86 percent and 55 percent year-on-year, it said.
The attacks were generally phishing or ransomware, indicating that ransomware “remained a formidable challenge,” the company said
The brands most frequently used for phishing attacks were Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, the report said.
The data in the report are collated by the Check Point ThreatCloud AI platform, “which analyzes big data telemetry and millions of indicators of compromise daily,” it said.
Its threat intelligence database is sourced from 150,000 connected networks, millions of endpoint devices, Check Point Research and dozens of external feeds, the company said.
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