Phishing attacks are growing less popular as cybercriminals learn they don't need to manipulate targets to gain access to their accounts. Instead they are breaking in with stolen credentials and known vulnerabilities, both of which are more difficult for enterprise victims to detect.
This trend is one of many highlighted in IBM's "X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2020," which aims to provide an overview of the threat landscape to security pros often caught in the weeds of day-to-day alerts. The report emphasizes today's popular attack vectors, the evolution of malware, commonly exploited flaws, and intensified activity against operational technology.
Phishing made up 31% of attacks in 2019, a notable drop from about half of attacks the year prior, according to the report. Exploits of known vulnerabilities came in second, spiking from 8% in 2018 to 30% in 2019. In third place were incidents using stolen credentials, a technique close behind at 29% of attacks.
"From a response perspective, those are generally harder for organizations to detect," says Wendi Whitemore, vice president of IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence, of the latter two tactics.
They're also not hard for attackers to pull off. Ideally, every business will have patched every system, Whitemore continues, but "the reality is, most organizations are struggling." More than 150,000 vulnerabilities have been disclosed to date, IBM reports. Flaws in Microsoft Office and Windows Server Message Block were still seeing "alarming rates" of exploitation in 2019.
Attackers are especially fond of remote code execution flaw CVE-2017-0199 and CVE-2017-11882, which was a favorite delivery mechanism ..
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