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Statistics reveal that unique malware samples collected fell to 60 million as compared with 64 million in 2015, therefore a 6.25 percent decrease. There was a decline in Total attack attempts too, with the figures dropping for the first time to 7.87 billion from 8.19 billion in 2015.
SonicWall’s 2017 Annual Threat Report attributes the drop in Malware attacks to the following reasons:
- Point-of-sale (POS) malware attacks fell by 93 percent – The number of new POS malware variants decreased by 88 percent since 2015 and 93 percent since 2014. Recalling, the year 2014, the SonicWall GRID Threat Network observed an increase in the number of new POS malware countermeasures developed and deployed by 333 per cent. Owing to the better security measures like chip?based POS systems coupled with better understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks associated with digital environments, the attacks reduced drastically.
- Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security encrypted traffic grew by 38 percent: SSL/TLS encryption jumped from 5.3 trillion web connections in 2015 to 7.3 trillion in 2016 partly due to the growing cloud application adoption rate. SonicWall detected 62% web connections following SSL/TLS ? encryption.
- Popular Malware families like Angler, Nuclear, and Neutrino died in 2016: In mid-2016 leading exploit kits like Angler, Nuclear, and Neutrino disappeared. While Angler died, post the arrest of 50 Russian hackers, Nuclear and Neutrino could only surge a bit before fading out in the latter half of 2016.
