With strong client authentication and 99 percent of cyber attacks can be prevented-Microsoft Hungary
More than half of all cyber-attacks against states, 58 from Russia, have been carried out in the last year, according to Microsoft’s latest annual report. Digital protection report from its report. However, most cyber-attacks are not perpetrated by states, but by ordinary cyber-criminals, who mostly do not know but want money from their victims, so the retail and financial sector players are the highest attack. Microsoft says today’s known attacks 99 allow all feedback to be beaten by simple, often free-of-charge methods, yet, requiring only less than 20 percent to use even a well-proven defense tool such as multi-factor authentication.
More than half of the cyber attacks, 58 percent, came from Russia in the past one year (July 2020 – June 2021), according to a Digital Defense Report produced and published annually by Microsoft. The Russians are primarily targets of government organizer control in the United States, Ukraine, and Britain, with increasing results — this has risen from 21 percent to 32 percent in a year.
Attacks by state actors were mostly targeted at government agencies in other countries (48%), advisors (31%), and aimed at obtaining valuable information. As a result, even their targets were ordinary citizens in nearly a quarter of cases (21%). Of course, only Russia has been active in cybercrime: the governments of North Korea, Iran, China, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam can also be guessed behind many attacks. Microsoft in the past three years a total of 20,500 repetitive government arrays that other governments are trying to get them into their IT systems have penetrated.
However, the majority of all cyber-attacks, not only by states, were not for information but for money, with retail (13%), followed by financial services (12%) and manufacturing (12%), government agencies (11%) and health care (9%). Most U.S. cyber attacks have suffered from U.S. users, nearly three times what the next-line country, China, is using. They were followed by citizens and organizations from Japan, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.
Microsoft says cybercrime has grown into a real industry in recent years, offering automated processes and applicable malware that specialize in a variety of tasks for fairly small amounts (under $ 100). They sell stolen IDs even at lower prices of a few dollars. The extortionist viruses used by criminals are currently the biggest threat to users.
Viruses are becoming more sophisticated and growing, so Microsoft is warning that the first line of defense for individuals and organizations must be strengthened. One such basic measure is the introduction of multi-factor authentication, in which Microsoft sends only less than 20 different applications. By simply starting to use multi-factor authentication, anti-virus software, and constantly updating systems to the latest version, 99 percent of the attacks known today can be reversed. The good news is that 220 of the number of companies using strong customer identification is projected to increase over the past 18 months. While many start these solutions if they are aware of the threat or because they themselves have fallen victim to a cyber attack, mass proliferation is the encouragement of legislation that requires attacks to be reported.
“The trend is clear: states are increasingly turning to cyber-attack tools to achieve policy goals. We forecast that even more states will be the next hostile target for various malicious software, the results of which will be increasing. The cybercrime market will also continue to evolve, as will the effectiveness of virus protection. At present, this defense is highly resource-intensive, so it is important that the public pay attention to this work and that decision-makers support these efforts, especially now in the European Cyber Security Month.”Said Christopher Mattheisen, Managing Director of Microsoft Hungary.
Microsoft’s full research in English can be read at this link, and details of a cyber security regional survey conducted in the fall on behalf of Microsoft in the fall available in Hungarian here.