The first quarter of 2023 has already seen 32 significant cyberattacks on government agencies, according to data from Surfshark.
A significant nine of these were reported to be cyber espionage – nearly as many as during the whole of 2022.
Yearly tendencies show that close to half of the analysed incidents happened over the last three years. The attacks on the governments varied from malware and ransomware attacks to social engineering and disinformation campaigns.
Since 2006, there have been at least 722 cyberattacks on government agencies. Fifteen percent of them were reportedly carried out as part of cyber espionage campaigns, meaning they were executed by state-sponsored threat actors.
Before 2020, around 29 cyberattacks on government agencies were reported every year, and this number rose to a yearly average of 96 with the start of a new decade.
Russian hackers striking on the French National Assembly website was the most recent case noted by CSIS. In March also, the US federal agency was targeted by multiple attackers, including a Vietnamese espionage group.
