80% of Threat Incident Report Engagements are Related to Organised Crime

80% of  all threat incident report engagements that were done by Secureworks are related to organised crime or basically e-crime, the firm’s Global Solutions Lead, Mayuresh Kothari said during the Africa Cloud and Security Summit 2022.

Mayuresh anaylysed three different areas where threat attacks are coming from which are organised crime, insider threat, and the nation state. Organised crime obviously takes a lot of the percentage of all threat attacks because it involves threats like ransomware, business email crime, cryptomining among others.

“It is important to note that even though the threats appear to be individual types of activities but they actually are not. They are related to each other and sometimes tend to be feeding off each other. This is what makes it a very complex mechanism to respond to,” he said.

In terms of insider threat, this comprises of around 15% of all incident report engagements done by Secureworks, according to Mayuresh the global solutions lead at the company.

“These could be from meagre maliciousness or negligence from insiders and mostly leads to either data loss or it will compromise the organisation itself,” he reiterated.

The most proven way of preventing insider threats is well training your team on the risks that are asscociated with their behaviours online. When employees are well educated on the risks then it reduces the chances of malicious attacks on the company’s website and digital platforms.

Nation state is the third area where threat attacks are coming from as analysed by Mayuresh Kothari. This accounts for just 5% of intelligence report engagements done by Secureworks. This has a small percentage because of the geopolitical nature of activity or engagement in the space.

“We are obviously having a lot of this now from the European side of the globe because of the Ukraine-Russia conflict,” Mayuresh said.

“It also could be the things in the past where we’ve seen a lot of nation state actors trying to compromise critical infrastructure of neighbouring countries. This is where some of this threats come from,” he added.

In Africa, we can not ignore the financially motivated cyber criminals and how they have tried to attack different types of organisations but at the end of the day they will always look for payment.