Security measures
More Vulnerabilities Than Ever
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system reported about 9,400 new vulnerabilities, with two-thirds of them involving networks.
More Unique Attacks Than Ever
Of 1.7 trillion attacks made against intrusion prevention systems, 37 million of them were unique. That’s a 100% increase from 2013.
Most Common Exploits
The Nuclear, Angler and Magnitude exploit kits together form almost 90% of the “in the wild” exploit kits. The Angler exploit kit is the most prevalent—accounting for approximately 60% of all exploit kits.
Number of Malware Attacks
Dell puts the number of malware attacks at 4.2 billion. Dell also reports 88 trillion hits for application traffic and 45 billion hits for post-infection malware activity.
Point-of-Sale Systems Under Attack
Dell SonicWALL created 13 POS malware signatures in 2014, compared with just three signatures in 2013, a 333% increase in the number of new POS malware countermeasures developed and deployed.
Embedded Systems Are Being Targeted
In 2014, Dell saw a twofold increase in SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) attacks, compared with 2013. Buffer-flow vulnerabilities continue to be the primary vehicle of attack.
Impact of Heartbleed
The Heartbleed buffer over-read vulnerability, disclosed in April 2014, potentially affected about 17% (about 500,000) of the secure Web servers on the Internet.
Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Discovered
Well-known zero-day vulnerabilities were released, with Shellshock vulnerabilities exploited by attackers within hours of the initial disclosure on Sept. 24, 2014. Within a week, millions of attacks and probes per day were observed.
Encrypted Connections on the Rise
Dell saw a 109% increase in the volume of HTTPS Web connections from the start of 2014 to the start of 2015. Trouble is, hackers are starting to hide malware by embedding it in encrypted connections.