Attacks against governments jumped 95% in last half of 2022
The number of attacks targeting the government sector increased by 95 per cent in the second half of 2022, a new report has found.
The report by AI-based cyber security vendor CloudSek found India, the US, Indonesia, and China accounted for 40 per cent of the total reported cyber security incidents in the government sector.
Rapid digitisation and the shift to remote work during the pandemic broadened the attack surface of government entities leading to an increase in attacks worldwide.
Government agencies are at a higher risk because of the huge amounts of individual data they collect and store. During an attack this information can be accessed and later sold on the dark web.
The most common types of attacks included hacktivist activity – hacking for political purposes – accounting for about nine per cent of the reported incidents in the government sector. Along with ransomware groups, which accounted for six per cent of the total incidents reported.
CloudSek noted to prevent future attacks a zero-trust model needs to be adopted by government agencies, assuming that the user identities or the network itself may already be compromised, proactively verifying the authenticity of user activity.
The report also found the most common threat actors of 2022 were KelvinSecurity and AgainstTheWest, the two groups were also most prominent in 2021.
KelvinSecurity uses targeted fuzzing and exploits common vulnerabilities to target victims. The group publicly shares information such as new exploits, targets, and databases on cybercrime forums.
AgainstTheWest started operations in October 2021 and identifies itself as APT49 or BlueHornet. It is focused on exfiltrating region-specific data and selling it on the dark web.
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