Trend Micro reported that its team intercepted 94 billion threats in 2021, marking a 42% increase in blocked attacks year-on-year, though some methods such as nonspecified attacks saw a decline, according to SDxCentral. In the cloud, cybercriminals took advantage of incorrect system configurations to compromise cloud infrastructures and remote workers at a time when an increasing number of enterprises are bringing their workloads to the cloud, the company said. Trend Micro named Amazon Elastic Block Store and Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines as having the highest misconfiguration rates among cloud services and recommended multilayered defense to help enterprises protect their data. The company also noted that ransomware gangs have increased their focus on industries that are more likely to pay, such as health care, banking and government, and are embracing ransomware-as-a-service. It added that although ransomware detection dropped by 21% in 2021, this might not indicate a decrease in attacks but rather the increased effectiveness of malware-blocking strategies.