Was something missing from the Cisco Annual Cybersecurity Report?

According to Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report:

• “Burst attacks” or short DDoS attacks affect 42% of the organizations studied
• Insider threats are still a huge issue
• More Operational Technology and IoT attacks are coming
• Hosting in the cloud as a side benefit of greater security
• Nearly half of security disks come from having multivendor environments
• New domains tied to SPAM campaigns

Many of these findings seem like common sense or in some ways in CISCO’s interest at first glance, but this 60+ page report goes into much greater detail than these one-liners. It breaks down the analysis by region and time and concludes about the difficulties of cyber defense:

“One reason defenders struggle to rise above the chaos of war with attackers, and truly see and understand what’s happening in the threat landscape, is the sheer volume of potentially malicious traffic they face. Our research shows that the volume of total events seen by Cisco cloud-based endpoint security products increased fourfold from January 2016 through October 2017”

The breadth and volume of attacks can overwhelm any organization and it is not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

One thing I didn’t see mentioned at all was cryptojacking, the unapproved leveraging of processing cycles for mining cryptocurrency. This form of cybersecurity risk affects large entities as well as individuals through their access of websites. Generally, this is less destructive than the previous cyber attack methods and may even be seen as an alternative to advertisements on sites, but it seemed odd to me that this rapidly advancing trend wasn’t mentioned.

The report is still worth looking over.