Attacks on Web Applications increased by 52% in 2019, Says New Report

• Web applications such as Slack, Microsoft 365, G Suite. Salesforce and Dropbox have become a new focus of interest for cybercriminals.
• These web applications are basically used to deliver cloud-first interfaces or offer web versions to complement on-premise software.

A study from SonicWall disclosed that cyberattacks on web applications are up by 52% in 2019. Majority of the attacks were likely conducted with the aim of obtaining financial and personal information.

Highly targeted web apps

Web applications such as Slack, Microsoft 365, G Suite. Salesforce and Dropbox have become a new target of interest for cybercriminals. These web applications are basically used to deliver cloud-first interfaces or offer web versions to complement on-premise software.

However, attackers can abuse them to get easy access to victim networks and systems.

Other key findings

SonicWall’s compiled report on cybersecurity threats provides data and statistics on different attack vectors like cryptojacking, ransomware attacks, and others.

• According to the report, there were a total of 9.9 million malware attacks during 2019.
• Out of this, 187.9 million were detected as ransomware attacks.
• Encrypted threats increased by 27%, thus endangering the security posture of organizations.
• IoT attacks were up by 5%, accounting for around 34.3 million attacks of the total malware attacks.
• Cryptojacking attacks had fallen by 78% in the second half of 2019. This decline in percentage is attributed to the shutting down of Coinhive and the pivot of some crypto hackers into more targeted attack vectors.

Future aspects

The report also highlights the evolution and weaponization of side-channel attacks, whereby attackers can target secure enclaves of a processor. This leads to destructive attacks from non-standard ports that are used to deliver malicious payloads.