By Marcos Colon
A new study by security firm SonicWall sheds light on a 6.25 percent drop in unique malware samples discovered in 2016 (60 million) versus those found in 2015 (64 million).
The “2017 Annual Threat Report” also found that attack attempts dropped to 7.87 billion from 8.19 billion in 2015, based on an analysis of the SonicWall Global Response Intelligence Defense (GRID) Threat Network.
One advanced threat that hasn’t shown any decrease is ransomware, with overall attack attempts skyrocketing from 4 million in 2015 to 638 million in 2016 – a 167x year-over-year increase.
“The rise of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) made it easier than ever for cyber criminals to access and deploy ransomware,” according to the report.
