The number of cyber threats increased 3,700% in 2022

Text Mark Taylor
Photo Michael Geiger / Unsplash

According to statistics from the Elisa Netivalvur service, from January to September, the number of cyber threats experienced by customers increased by almost 3,700 per cent. Although the number of attacks decreased slightly by the end of the year, in December it was still necessary to respond to ten times more incidents than in January.

In total during 2022, Netivalvur protected users from 666,721 different threats. The lowest number of threats came in January. September saw the most incidents with more than 257,000 different threats. Malware was the most common threat to Internet users, while massive phishing and bot networks have also been important attack vectors.

“After a very active beginning to the autumn, the number of threats decreased, but cybercriminals did not rest for long. Already in November, the number of detected threats began to grow rapidly again, and in December the mid-summer level was again reached. If we look at last year as a whole, the trend was more in the direction of intensification, and there is no reason to believe that attackers will become less active this year,” said Meelis Seer, Head of New Services at Elisa.

Last year, Estonians faced a wide range of attacks that tried to infect devices with malware, extort money from users or make daily services unavailable.

For example, in the past year, bogus banking websites have frequently emerged, allowing attackers to gain access to victims’ bank accounts. Such fake sites have risen to high positions in the search engines, with the relevant links also spread through posts. Along with fake websites, fraudulent calls from foreign numbers were widespread in order to extort money. In total 750 claims of theft and fraud were reported to the Police and Border Guard Board during the past year, with the value of money lost at more than 5 million euros.

“It’s not just private individuals that have been affected by the attacks, management scams and denial-of-service attacks are still on the rise. The latter are made especially dangerous by the fact that they can be carried out using users’ own devices without their knowledge – if people do not protect and update their devices, they can be used by attackers to carry out large-scale attacks,” explained Mai Kraft, Chief Information Security Officer at Elisa.

To learn more about this and similar topics
Cybercriminals Cyber Threats Elisa Internet Security Malware Netivalvur Scam