WP Cyber Threat Index | Cyber Security Statistics & Trends | Imperva

Cyber Threat Index Score by Country

View threat level by:

Country

Insights and Recommendations

Imperva’s cloud networks, the same network that gathers the data behind our Cyber Threat Index, also powers the suite of products that protects our customers from those attacks every day. Start by reading our expert analysis on this month’s most significant insights, and then click to take action below.

The largest DDoS attack we’ve seen since September occurred in early February, with a 4.7M requests per second (RPS) onslaught targeting an Indonesian gaming site. The attack came from 1,700 Canadian, Indian, and US IPs, and mainly leveraged Chrome and the Nessus vulnerability scanner–an uncommon client in DDoS attacks, accounting for just 1% of all DDoS. Although this tool is typically used by cybersecurity professionals to identify vulnerabilities within their networks, in this instance, it was repurposed as a weapon, exploiting its capabilities to scan for and exploit weaknesses at scale.

Take action:
Imperva DDoS Protection secures all your assets at the edge for uninterrupted operation.

A Spanish financial site saw an attempted account takeover (ATO) attack this month. The attack leveraged over 294,000 IPs, primarily based in Spain.The majority (63%) of the logins in this attack came from previously compromised login information. For the financial sector, which deals with highly sensitive and personal information, such attacks pose a risk to individual account security and also threaten customers’ integrity and trust in financial institutions.

Take action:
Imperva Account Takeover prevention uses multi-layered detection to block fraud.

Attacks on Russian travel sites skyrocketed ahead of the summer travel season. Two prominent travel sites saw millions of business logic attacks, coming primarily from Russian IP addresses, during their peak sales season where they advertise deals on travel to popular destinations. These attacks primarily attempted to scrape pricing information, but also attempted to tamper with parameters and access hidden endpoints. The timing of these attacks indicates a strategic choice by the attackers to inflict maximum disruption, not only to the travel sites' operations but also to the broader ecosystem of users looking forward to summer travel deals.

Take action:
Imperva Advanced Bot Protection prevents data theft from all access points – websites, mobile apps and APIs.

Critical vulnerabilities in two WordPress plugins – Bricks Builder and Ultimate Member – were announced this month. Imperva tracked thousands of attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities within the first few days of each release, including known attack groups leveraging these bugs. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2024-25600 and CVE-2024-1071, affect hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites.

Take action:
For more information about these vulnerabilities, see these blogs: Bricks Builder and Ultimate Member.

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Application Security Threats

Understand how applications are attacked globally. Learn the types of attacks and the vulnerabilities exploited.

Application Security Highlights

With visibility into global web application traffic from different industries, the Cyber Threat Index is a comprehensive look at application security.

Total Number of Requests Analyzed

Total Number of Application Attacks Blocked

Origin of Web Threats

This map reflects the relative amount of attacks per country, after normalizing the number of attacks with legitimate traffic. Hover mouse over the countries to see data.

Country vs Country Heatmap

This heatmap shows attacks where countries are the source (attackers) or destination (attacked) of application security attacks. The number represents a relative, normalized value.

Cyber Attack Types

Breakdown of attack attempts seen in our network, split by attack types.

Cyber Attacks by Source

Breakdown of attack attempts seen in our network, split by the source of the attacking traffic.

Automated vs Human Attacks

Shows the proportion of bot and human traffic identified as performing attacks within all observed traffic.

Attacks Observed by Tool Used

Shows the breakdown of attacks in our network by the type of tool used by attackers.

Vulnerabilities by Severity

Shows the number of disclosed vulnerabilities for every day of the month. These vulnerabilities are separated by severity. Includes both CVE (Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure) and ‘Non-CVEs’.

Vulnerabilities by ‘Exploitability’

Breakdown of vulnerabilities disclosed by the “exploitability” (e.g. whether there is a published exploit) of the disclosed vulnerability.

Vulnerabilities by Attack Type

Shows the breakdown of attack types for the published vulnerabilities.

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Data Security Threats

Understand how databases are attacked and make sense of the vulnerabilities on different platforms.

Vulnerabilities by Severity

In the following chart you can see the disclosed vulnerabilities for every day of the month. We separate them by their severity. This includes both CVE (Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure) and ‘Non-CVEs’.

Low Severity

Vulnerabilities

Medium Severity

Vulnerabilities

HIGH Severity

Vulnerabilities

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DDoS Threats

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks take a business offline. Understand which industries and countries suffer the most and the different types of DDoS attacks. Learn about the duration, size, and volume of DDoS attacks.

DDoS Attacks Highlights

Understand the duration of the longest attack. Know the size and volume of the largest DDoS attacks. Learn more about DDoS here.

Longest DDoS
attack

Largest Web Application
DDoS attack

Largest Bandwidth Network
Layer DDoS Attack

Highest Volume Network
Layer DDoS Attack

Application Layer DDoS Attack

Shows the volume of Application Layer attacks for each day of the month by the maximum total requests per second (RPS) blocked by our DDoS mitigation service.

DDoS Attacks by Attacked Country

Breakdown of DDoS attacks by the attacked country.

DDoS Attacks by Attacked Industry

Breakdown of DDoS attacks by the attacked industry.

Network Layer DDoS Attack

Network layer attacks look to overwhelm the target by exhausting the available bandwidth. Shows the attacks by their bandwidth and by volume.

Network Layer Attack Volume (Gbps) by Vector

Breakdown of bandwidth volume (Gigabits per second) by the vector used in network layer DDoS attacks.

Network Layer Attack Rates (Mpps) by Vector

Breakdown of attack rates (Mega packets per second) by the vector used in network layer DDoS attacks.

Take The Next Step

Our insights and recommendations are just the starting point. With Imperva’s dedicated team by your side, and access to our cloud network-powered suite of products, you can get protected, quicker.

Get in Touch

Media Inquiries

Every month we update the Cyber Threat Index with the latest data and charts. Please contact us for additional insight or to interview the threat researchers from the Imperva Research Lab.

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What is the Cyber Threat Index?

The Cyber Threat Index is a monthly measurement and analysis of the global cyber threat landscape across data and applications.

The Cyber Threat Index provides an easy-to-understand score to track cyber threat level consistently over time, as well as observe trends. The data is (when applicable) also analyzed by industry and by country, to provide further analytics and insights.

The Cyber Threat Index is calculated using data gathered from all Imperva sensors across the world including over:

  • Over 25 monthly PBs (Peta Bytes1015) of network traffic passed through our CDN
  • 30 billions (109) of monthly Web application attacks, across 1 trillion (10¹²) of HTTP requests analyzed by our Web Application Firewall service (Cloud WAF)
  • Hundreds of monthly application and database vulnerabilities, as processed by our security intelligence aggregation from multiple sources

Viewers of the global Cyber Threat Index can dive deeper into the score & drill-down for individual industries and countries, and also view historic Index scores.

On a monthly basis, our security experts are analyzing the data, to create insights about events and trends in data & application security based on the data we see. When applicable, we may also suggest recommendations for enhancing the security posture against the threats we see.

How is the index calculated?

The index is based on a number of ingredients: network traffic, attack traffic and vulnerabilities.

We store attack data, as well as statistics about the network traffic we see from our Cloud WAF. This data is sent from our Cloud WAF proxies to our data warehouse, where it is enriched & aggregated.

On a daily basis, we run analytics on the data we collect, to calculate a daily risk score per site, per industry & per country.

Vulnerabilities

When calculating the vulnerabilities’ risk, our assessment is that:

  • The more severe the vulnerability – the higher the risk (Impact can be larger, for example: taking over a server vs disclosing system information)
  • The more recent the vulnerability – the higher the risk (The assumption is that patching of systems takes time, therefore there will be more vulnerable systems accessible)
  • If there is a public exploit, the risk is higher as more attackers has the ability to exploit the vulnerability, and the more wide-spread it is the higher the risk.

DDoS Attacks

We store statistics on both network DDoS attacks and application DDoS attacks.

Network DDoS attack statistics include details about the duration of the attack, the volume of the attacks, number of sources and their proportion in the attack, different ports and methods (e.g. SYN flood, amplification etc.). These statistics are calculated and stored for attacks both in terms of packet per second and in terms of bytes per second.

Application DDoS (Layer 7 DDoS attacks) statistics include information about the duration of the attack, the volume of the attack, the tools that were used and the different countries it originated from in terms of requests per second.

We normalize all DDoS attacks statistics against the statistics we have about legitimate traffic, to prevent bias for increased/decreased amount of assets we protect (Globally or for a certain industry/country).

Application Security Attacks (As seen in the wild)

At first, instead of dealing with a huge amount of daily attacking requests, we aggregate them into attacks (Each attack can have a very large number of HTTP requests as part of it). For each attack, we check:

  • The highest risk level of triggered rule within that attack (For example: an SQL Injection attack has more weight than an information disclosure attack).
  • The higher the intensity of the attack, the higher the risk.
  • The newer the mitigation, the riskier the attack (We constantly add mitigations to our cloud WAF, and the assumption is that newer attacks has more success ratio than older ones).

For the analytics and insights we provide, we also enrich the data, for example:

  • Adding target industry classification for the applications being attacked.
  • Adding source & target countries.
  • Adding source network types (For example: public cloud, TOR, etc).

The risk is then calculated by removing the lowest-risk attacks, as they’re meaningless in terms of added risk, and determining the risk is done by normalizing attack traffic against normal traffic. The logic to this normalization is that we don’t want the index to be affected by increased/decreased traffic (For example: if we have 20% more traffic due to new customers in a certain month, we don’t want it to affect the risk index).