Cisco Report Shows Surge in Advanced Attacks, Malicious Traffic

The Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report reveals that threats designed to take advantage of users’ trust in systems, applications and personal networks have reached startling levels.

According to the report, a worldwide shortage of nearly a million skilled security professionals is impacting organizations’ abilities to monitor and secure networks, while overall vulnerabilities and threats reached their highest levels since 2000.

Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.

Meanwhile, the report’s findings offer a vivid picture of rapidly evolving security challenges facing businesses, IT departments and individuals.

Attacker methods include socially engineered theft of passwords and credentials, hide-in-plain-sight infiltrations, and exploitation of the trust required for economic transactions, government services and social interactions.

The report highlights contained that there is an increased sophistication and proliferation of the threat landscape.

Simple attacks that caused containable damage have given way to organized cybercrime operations that are sophisticated, well-funded, and capable of significant economic and reputational damage to public and private sector victims.
Also, Cisco documented an increased complexity of threats and solutions due to rapid growth in intelligent mobile device adoption and cloud computing provide a greater attack surface than ever before.

New classes of devices and new infrastructure architectures offer attackers opportunities to exploit unanticipated weaknesses and inadequately defended assets.

While cybercriminals have learned that harnessing the power of Internet infrastructure yields far more benefits than simply gaining access to individual computers or devices.

These infrastructure-scale attacks seek to gain access to strategically positioned web hosting servers, name servers and data centers—with the goal of proliferating attacks across legions of individual assets served by these resources.

By targeting Internet infrastructure, attackers undermine trust in everything connected to or enabled by it.

Commenting on the findings, Mr. Dare Ogunlade, general manager Cisco, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra-Leone said: “Although the Cisco Annual Security Report paints a grim picture of the current state of cyber security, there is hope for restoring trust in people, institutions and technologies – and that starts with empowering defenders with real-world knowledge about expanding attack surfaces.

To truly protect against all of these possible attacks, defenders must understand the attackers, their motivations and their methods – before, during and after an attack.”