BlackFog Global Threat Statistics 2019 – The Year in Review

BlackFog collected threat statistics on a global basis for 2019. These statistics capture all data exfiltration from devices over a 12 month period for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.

In 2019 we saw a total of 3.12% of all data exfiltrated through the Dark Web with a high of 6.11% in May. This consists of any connection trying to anonymize traffic using the Onion Router or other anonymization services. This is commonly used when exfiltrating data from user devices.

PowerShell attacks averaged 6.23% through the year with a high of 10.69% in October. We have seen this fluctuate throughout 2019 and this seems to correlate strongly with the rise in ransomware at various times of the year. It remains a common Fileless technique for obfuscating code and dropping malware onto devices.

Spyware represents any threat that monitors user activity, collects passwords through key loggers, camera activation or forensic analysis. Spyware remained consistent throughout the year with an average of 2.34% across all threat vectors.

Direct IP’s are still being used to conceal the destination of network connections. Even some legitimate services persist in hard coding IP’s directly into their products. This is most commonly used to try and evade DNS registration and the origin of servers. Malware and ransomware rely on this to make connections to pools of servers. It represented 41.14% of all threats detected by BlackFog in 2019.

Exfiltration based on geography saw 15.85% of all data being exfiltrated to Russia. This has been consistent throughout the year and reflects the sheer volume of attacks originating from this geographic region. China represented 2.62% of exfiltrated traffic over the same period. This peaked at 4.58% in Q1 but has otherwise remained stable throughout 2019. This correlates well with the number of espionage indictments by the US government.