Malware: Weapon of mass disruption (infographic)

13 Mar 2014

The US, South Korea and Canada were the top advanced persistent threat (APT) targets in 2013, with the US, Canada and Germany victimised by the highest number of unique malware families, networking security firm FireEye’s 2013 Advanced Threat Report reveals.

More than 100 APT families were detected in the US, 52 were detected in Canada, and 45 APT families were detected in Germany.

The data in the report comes from the FireEye Dynamic Threat Intelligence (DTI) cloud, and is based on attack metrics shared by FireEye customers worldwide.

The 2013 report focuses almost exclusively on a small subset of FireEye’s overall data analysis, the APT, Kenneth Geers, senior global threat analyst at FireEye wrote in a blog post.

“APTs, due to their organisational structure, mission focus, and likely some level of nation-state support, often pose a more serious danger to enterprises than a lone hacker or hacker group ever could,” wrote Geers.

“Over the long term, APTs are capable of cyberattacks that can rise to a strategic level, including widespread intellectual property theft, espionage, and attacks on national critical infrastructures.”

FireEye has also taken data from the report and compiled it into an infographic to provide an overview the findings.

Infographic

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com