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“ This report highlights the deficiencies in traditional defences that rely on detection to block malware ,” said Dr Ian Pratt , Global Head of Security for Personal Systems at HP .

“ Attackers have repeatedly found new ways to bypass traditional detection-based tools , making it more important than ever for organisations to build Zero Trust design principles into their security architecture .”

“ Opportunistic cybercrime does not show any signs of slowing ,” said Alex Holland , Senior Malware Analyst at HP .

“ Cybercriminals are exploiting low-cost Malware-as-a-Service kits , which are proliferating in underground forums . Kits like APOMacroSploit , which emerged in Q4 2020 , can be bought for as little as US $ 50 , illustrating just how low the barrier to entry is for opportunistic cybercrime . We have also seen threat actors continue to experiment with malware delivery techniques to improve their chances of establishing footholds into networks . The most effective execution techniques we saw in Q4 2020 involved old technologies like Excel 4.0 macros that often offer little visibility to detection tools .” Other key findings in the report include :

• Trojans made up 66 % of malware samples analysed , driven largely by malicious spam campaigns distributing Dridex malware , which a recent HP blog flagged as having increased in prevalence by 239 %.

• 88 % of malware detected was delivered via email – with the most common lures being fake invoice attachments – while web downloads were responsible for the remaining 12 %.

• The most common type of malicious attachments were : documents ( 31 %), archive files ( 28 %), spreadsheets ( 19 %) and executable files ( 17 %).

• Malicious executables rose by 12 %, with CVE-2017-11882 – a memory corruption flaw in Microsoft Office ’ s Equation Editor – accounting for nearly three-quarters of the exploits isolated by HP Sure Click .

• A 12 % growth in malware that exploits CVE- 2017-0199 , which is commonly used to run malicious scripts to deploy malware when a user opens an Office document . �