A new report from security provider Blackberry Ltd. shows a sharp increase in the deployment of unique malware used to attack critical infrastructure and commercial enterprises.
The company’s quarterly threat report for June – and covering the first quarter of 2024 – says it detected an increase of over 40 percent in use of unique malware in 630,000 malicious hashes.
“This reporting period, BlackBerry observed over a 40 percent per-minute increase in novel hashes (unique malware), compared to the September through December 2023 period,” the company said.
The report also describes an increase in attack rates in targets across five nations – including the U.S. – targeting vulnerable or high-valued targets.
“Unique, custom tools and tactics might be developed by a highly resourced threat actor that wants to attack a specific, high-value target like a CFO of a particular company,” the report says. “Deepfakes are increasingly used to target specific victims, such as using a deepfake voice recording of a CEO to convince that company’s finance manager to transfer money.”
Other significant findings include that 60 percent of all attacks were made on critical infrastructure targets, with 40 percent of those directed to the financial sector.
