Canada was among the leading countries frequently targeted by advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks in 2013, according to the latest Advanced Threat Report from network security firm FireEye Inc.
The company recently released the data gathered by its security platform from nearly 40,000 unique attacks (equivalent to more than 100 attacks per day) last year and more than 202 million malware command and control communications (CnC). The report provides a global snapshot of cyber attacks that bypass defenses such as antivirus, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, next general firewalls and security gateways.
In order of highest to lowest frequency of attacks, the top 10 countries targeted by APTs last year were:
- United States
- South Korea
- Canada
- Japan
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
- Saudi Arabia
- Israel
The top 10 types of organizations targeted by APTs were:
- National government
- Services/consulting
- Technology
- Financial services
- Telecommunications
- Education
- Aerospace
- State and local governments
- Chemical
- Energy
FireEye (NASDAQ: FEYE) found that businesses were attacked once every 1.5 seconds on average, compared to one every three seconds in 2012.
Malware CnC, are now in 206 countries up from just 184 in 2012. The U.S., Germany, South Korea, China, Netherlands, U.K., and Russia had the most malware CnC servers.