Chinese hackers ramp up cyber attacks against European companies

NTT Security, a security company, recently released the 2018 Global Threat Intelligence Report, stating that the company has used more than 6.1 trillion logs and 150 million attacks on research resources such as honeypots and sandboxes deployed in more than 100 countries. After conducting a meta-analysis, it was found that Chinese hackers organizations are spiking up against cyber attacks by European companies.

According to the 2016 Global Threat Intelligence Report released by the security company NTT Security, China’s network attacks on European, Middle East, and African (EMEA) companies accounted for less than 3% of the total. At that time, it ranked ninth among attack sources. The new report shows that China has become the number one source of attacks in the EMEA region in 2017, claiming that 67% of the manufacturing network in the region was attacked by China.

In its report, NTT emphasized that the attack against the financial industry is characterized by widespread use of spyware, keyloggers, and attacks based on applications.

In 2017, the highest increase in cyber attacks in the technology industry (the global average increase of 25%). The characteristics of these attacks are as follows: Attacks are conducted through reconnaissance and previously known sources.

The gaming industry has become a major target for hackers, and gambling and gambling have become the main targets of ransomware attacks. NTT researchers pointed out that the number of botnet attacks in the EMEA region is “abnormally high”.

In 2017, ransomware accounted for 7% of global malware, a surge of 3.5 times. Several industries highly targeted by ransomware have the same characteristics: System power failure disrupts business continuity and directly affects revenue. In addition, some industries targeted by ransomware have highly sensitive intellectual property rights. Although NTT found ransomware attacks in various industries, the five major target industries of commercial and professional services, finance, manufacturing, technology, and government accounted for 72% of all ransomware attacks.

Among all ransomware detected, Locky (45%) and WannaCry (30%) dominated, while other types of ransomware accounted for 25%.