SonicWall has announced its mid-year report, and – guess what? – they report an “exponential increase in overall cyberattacks”!

Their announcement (SonicWall Report Details Exponential Increase in Overall Cyberattacks; Reveals Potential Revenue Risk for Businesses, available here) does something unusual – it lists several key cyber stats before even getting into the announcement itself. Here are the stats that lead off the announcement:

• At least 12.6% of an organization’s annual revenues were at risk to cyber threats
• Sensors detected 125% attack hours – 10 attack hours in an 8-hour workday
• Businesses endured on average 1,104 hours of critical attacks during a span of 880 working hours; protected from a potential of 46 days of downtime
• Malware trended up 30% YoY, including a massive 92% spike in May alone
• Ransomware intensifies in North America (+15%) and explodes in LATAM (+51%)
• IoT attacks (+107%) and encrypted threats (+92%) continue to climb globally
• 83% of customer-received alerts seen by our managed services team are related to cloud apps and compromised credentials
• SonicWall identified 78,923 ‘never-before-seen’ malware variants – 526 a day

These stats are all contained within the 2024 SonicWall Mid-Year Cyber Threat Report (available here), researched and compiled by SonicWall Capture Labs, which unveils yet another rise in overall attacks, after seeing an 11% increase observed in 2023. The report details the evolving threat landscape over the first five months of this year, highlighting the persistent, relentless and escalating nature of cyber threats globally.

One of the most interesting aspects about the report was a methodology shift in how SonicWall measures threats – going from measuring every hit (HITS) against a firewall to the number of hours a firewall is under attack (TICKS). The analogy they provide is: “We had three million raindrops this afternoon,” vs “It rained hard for an hour this afternoon” – the second one is obviously more useful. Not only that, but if you divide annual revenue by hours in a year to get the hourly revenue, it enables you to quantify the revenue impact of the attacks. Smart.

The 19-page PDF 2024 SonicWall Mid-Year Cyber Threat Report provides stats, trends and a whole lot more in a highly-graphic report. Check it out here!

So, what do you think? Which stat above concerns you the most? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot looking at malware on a computer monitor”.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.