New data from Check Point Research (CPR) shows that the global volume of cyberattacks reached an all-time high in Q4 with an average of 1 168 weekly attacks per organisation.
The top three most attacked industries in 2022 were Education/Research, Government, and Healthcare.
Africa experienced the highest volume of attacks out of any geography with 1,875 weekly attacks per organisation, followed by APAC with 1 691 weekly attacks per organisation. North America (+52%), Latin America (+29%), and Europe (+26%) showed the largest increases in cyberattacks in 2022, compared to 2021. The US saw a 57% increase in overall cyberattacks in 2022, while the UK saw a 77% increase and Singapore experienced a 26% increase.
Omer Dembinsky, data group manager at Check Point Software, comments: “Cyberattacks are increasing worldwide, with 38% more cyberattacks per week on corporate networks in 2022, compared to 2021. Several cyber threat trends are happening simultaneously.
“For one, the ransomware ecosystem is continuing to evolve and grow with smaller, more agile criminal groups that have formed to evade law enforcement. Second, hackers are widening their aim to target business collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams, OneDrive, and Google Drive with phishing exploits. These make for a rich source of sensitive data given that most organisations’ employees continue to work remotely.
“Third, academic institutions have become a popular feeding ground for cybercriminals following the rapid digitisation they undertook in response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Dembinsky says. “In fact, the education/research sector was the number one most attacked industry globally, seeing a 43% increase in 2022 compared to 2021, with an average of 2 314 attacks per organisation every week.
“Many education institutions have been ill-prepared for the unexpected shift to online learning, creating ample opportunity for hackers to infiltrate networks through any means necessary. Schools and universities also have the unique challenge of dealing with children or young adults, many of whom use their own devices, work from shared locations, and often connect to public Wi-Fi without thinking of the security implications.”
Looking back at cyberattacks for the healthcare sector in 2022, healthcare organisations in the US suffered an average of 1 410 weekly cyberattacks per organisation, which is 86% higher than the number we saw in 2021. Healthcare ranked second out of all sectors for the most cyberattacks in the US.
Hackers like to target hospitals because they perceive them as short on cybersecurity resources. Smaller hospitals are particularly vulnerable as they are underfunded and understaffed to handle a sophisticated cyberattack.
The healthcare sector is lucrative to hackers as they aim to retrieve health insurance information, medical records numbers and, sometimes, even social security numbers with direct threats from ransomware gangs to patients, demanding payment under threats of having patient records released. Ransomware gangs also find the attention gained from attacking a hospital as an attractive plus-point for their notoriety.
Check Point expects the increase in cyberattack activity to continue. With AI technologies such as ChatGPT readily available to the public, it is possible for hackers to generate malicious code and emails at a faster, more automated pace.