FortiGuard Labs Reports Disruptive Shift of Cyber Threats

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 24, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances, FortiGuard Labs
“2020 witnessed a dramatic cyber threat landscape from beginning to end. Although the pandemic played a central role, as the year progressed cyber adversaries evolved attacks with increasingly disruptive outcomes. They maximized the expanded digital attack surface beyond the core network, to target remote work or learning, and the digital supply chain. Cybersecurity risk has never been greater as everything is interconnected in a larger digital environment. Integrated and AI-driven platform approaches, powered by actionable threat intelligence, are vital to defend across all edges and to identify and remediate threats organizations face today in real time.”

News Summary:
Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced the findings of the latest semiannual FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report. Threat intelligence from the second half of 2020 demonstrates an unprecedented cyber threat landscape where cyber adversaries maximized the constantly expanding attack surface to scale threat efforts around the world. Adversaries proved to be highly adaptable, creating waves of disruptive and sophisticated attacks. They targeted the abundance of remote workers or learners outside the traditional network, but also showed renewed agility in attempts to target digital supply chains and even the core network. For a detailed view of the report, as well as some important takeaways, read the blog. Highlights of the 2H 2020 report follow:

Fighting Cyber Adversaries Requires an Integrated Strategy and Broad Awareness
Organizations face a threat landscape with attacks on all fronts. Threat intelligence remains central to understanding these threats and how to defend against evolving threat vectors. Visibility is also critical, particularly when a significant amount of users are outside the typical network scenario. Every device creates a new network edge that must be monitored and secured. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated threat detection can enable organizations to address attacks immediately, not later, and are necessary to mitigate attacks at speed and scale across all edges. Cybersecurity user awareness training should also remain a priority as cyber hygiene is not just the domain of IT and security teams. Everyone needs regular training and instruction on best practices to keep individual employees and the organization secure.

Report Overview
This latest Global Threat Landscape Report is a view representing the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs, drawn from Fortinet’s vast array of sensors collecting billions of threat events observed around the world during the second half of 2020. Similar to how the MITRE ATT&CK framework classifies adversary tactics and techniques, with the first three groupings spanning reconnaissance, resource development, and initial access, the FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report leverages this model to describe how threat actors find vulnerabilities, build malicious infrastructure, and exploit their targets. The report also covers global and regional perspectives as well.

Additional Resources

About FortiGuard Labs
FortiGuard Labs is the threat intelligence and research organization at Fortinet. Its mission is to provide Fortinet customers with the industry’s best threat intelligence designed to protect them from malicious activity and sophisticated cyberattacks. It is comprised of some of the industry’s most knowledgeable threat hunters, researchers, analysts, engineers and data scientists in the industry, working in dedicated threat research labs all around the world. FortiGuard Labs continuously monitors the worldwide attack surface using millions of network sensors and hundreds of intelligence-sharing partners. It analyzes and processes this information using artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovative technology to mine that data for new threats. These efforts result in timely, actionable threat intelligence in the form of Fortinet security product updates, proactive threat research to help our customers better understand the threats and threat actors they face, and by providing threat intelligence consulting services to help our customers better understand and defend their threat landscape. Learn more at http://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.

About Fortinet
Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers our customers with complete visibility and control across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric platform can address the most critical security challenges and protect data across the entire digital infrastructure, whether in networked, application, multi-cloud or edge environments. Fortinet ranks #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide and more than 500,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. Both a technology company and a learning organization, Fortinet's (NSE) Training Institute has one of the largest and broadest cybersecurity training programs in the industry. Learn more at http://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.

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