Highlights of eSentire’s Q1 2019 Quarterly Threat Report

Earlier this week we released our Q1 2019 Quarterly Threat Report. The content and analysis for this report is built off of intelligence gathered from 2,000+ proprietary network and host-based detection sensors we have deployed at more than 650 small and mid-sized businesses across the globe.

The biggest takeaway from the report? Our data shows that 8% of externally-facing IT assets are susceptible of being exploited by a high or critical severity vulnerability as classified by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) v3.0 used by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

Between 2015 and 2019, data from exploit-dbreveals that the number of distinct products with reported vulnerabilities has increased by 150 percent. Over this same period, the weaponization time for the creation of exploits to take advantage of these published vulnerabilities dropped from being several months to almost immediately. This drastic decrease in patching time has resulted in a situation where IT departments are faced with not having enough resources to identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities while having to continue to manage day-to-day business operations.

eSentire Threat Intelligence also observed that malicious traffic saw an almost 35 percent decline during the first quarter of 2019 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2018. This decline can be attributed to several factors including a reduced number of observed opportunistic exploitation campaigns and significant drop-off of coining malware detections which had seen a 1,500 percent increase in observations last year.

Additional Q1 2019 Quarterly Threat Report Findings:

• The five most targeted industries are biotechnology, accounting, education, technology, and non-profits
• Thursday the most popular day of the week for observed phishing incidents; with INTERAC, Facebook, and Microsoft being the most popular lures used
• It took almost 40 hours for the majority of antivirus engines to be able to detect a new variant of Emotet malware
• Over 60% of observed malware enters businesses via email attachments

If you are interested in learning more, the full report can be downloaded from: https://www.esentire.com/resource-library/q1-2019-quarterly-threat-report/