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The continuous sophistication of attacks

The world ’ s first cyberattack took place in November 1988 when Robert Tappan Morris wrote the first ever distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) program . In the last 30 years , cyberattacks on businesses have become much more frequent , and sophisticated .

The adoption of digital transformation strategies and the Internet of Things ( IoT ) has led to an exponential rise in the number of vulnerable endpoints that can be exploited – there are millions of connected devices on the internet today . The repercussions are evident in some of the cybercrime statistics . There were 1244 data breaches and 447 million exposed records in 2018 alone . And a University of Maryland study concluded that a hacking attempt occurs once every 39 seconds . Juniper Research predicted that cybercrime will cost businesses over $ 2 trillion by 2019 .

Moreover , cyberattackers have become more creative in their attack methods using tactics such as smart phishing , fileless , malware , and zero-day exploits . Smart phishing involves the hacker doing substantial background research before targeting a victim .

Fileless malware attacks occur when hackers , instead of installing malware on host machines , use built-in system tools such as PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation ( WMI ) to gain privileged access and move laterally . It is more difficult to detect such attacks as they go unnoticed amongst the routine activities that administrators carry out using these same tools . �

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