A Cyber Revolution: Advanced Attacks Increasing in EMEA Reflect Political Tension

A Cyber Revolution: Advanced Attacks Increasing in EMEA Reflect Political Tension

Financial, geopolitical and economical changes made 2015 a very busy year for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, particularly in the cyber realm. FireEye has been monitoring these shifting cyber trends and has identified considerable evolutions to the EMEA threat landscape when comparing the second half of the year to the first half.

To share our observations, we present the FireEye Regional Advanced Threat Report for EMEA 2H2015, a follow on report from our mid-2015 publication. This report provides an overview of the advanced persistent threats (APT) targeting computer networks in EMEA during the second half of 2015, and also contains various other key observations, including:

• Cyber attacks continue to reflect ongoing “real world” events. In the second half of 2015, with political tensions in Turkey and financial tensions on European markets with uncertain outlooks, we observed similar patterns in cyber threats.
• Turkey, Spain, Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Great Britain represent more than 60 percent of total alerts associated with advanced threat activity seen in 2H2015.
• Ransomware continues to pose a threat to organisations, and the malware development lifecycle is so short that many organisations continue to struggle at defending against compromises.
• Cybercriminals continue to utilise macro embedded Microsoft Office documents to deliver malicious payloads.
• Advanced threats are increasingly targeting governments and the financial services industry, and there has been a significant increase in attacks targeting the aerospace and defense industry.

 

Looking forward, we predict that malicious actors targeting entities in the EMEA region are going to become even more disruptive by either changing data or destroying it. As such, this report additionally includes some recommendations on how to best defend against today’s attackers and other threats.

View the full report.

Join us for a live webinar on Thursday, May 19 2016, 1PM (BST) as we discuss the latest findings from the report.
 
You can register here.

To continue the conversation, join us on Twitter from 2pm BST onwards on May 19th for a Twitter Chat with the authors of the report, using hashtag #AskFEYE.