Cyber Attacks Increase 79%
March 2001
Managed security provider Riptech, Inc., has released a report revealing that the rate of cyber attacks has increased by 79 percent in the last six months. This, and other findings feature in Riptech's Internet Security Threat Report, which the company says is the first report to present cyber attack trends based on the empirical analysis of actual cyber attacks detected against a global sample of security devices.According to Internet Security Threat Report the rate of attack activity increased by 79 percent between July and December 2001, with a substantial percent of attacks (39 percent) targeted at a specific organization. A small number of nations were the source of the vast majority of the attacks: U.S. (30 percent), South Korea (9 percent), China (8 percent). Interestingly, after adjusting for the number of Internet users in each country, the intensity of attacks from Israel was nearly double the attack intensity rate of any other individual country.
Riptech also found that different industries suffered significantly different rates of attack intensity and severity. High tech, financial services, media/entertainment, and power and energy experienced the highest number of attacks per company, each averaging more than 700 attacks per company over the past six months. However, the power and energy industry suffered the most, with companies in that industry being subjected to severe attacks at a rate that was over twice the mean of all companies in the sample set.
Attack intensity and intent varied moderately based on company size, and differed significantly based on ownership type. Companies with 500 or more employees suffered at least 50 percent more attacks per company than companies with less than 500 employees. Public companies suffered approximately twice the number of attacks per company as private and nonprofit companies.
Source...
