Network attacks increased to a 3-year high

In this video for Help Net Security, Corey Nachreiner, CSO at WatchGuard Technologies, gives a high-level summary of the Internet Security Report for Q4 2021, which revealed all of the threats were up, whether they’re network attacks or malware.

When the pandemic started, the research team saw a big drop in malware being detected by network security devices. In this period, tech based jobs moved to remote work, which meant a lot of users were no longer browsing the internet and encountering bad things through the network security control at the office. That’s probably why network detection for malware dropped quite a bit at the beginning of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, network attacks continued to rise even through the pandemic, since the servers still lived at the offices and the cloud, and network security still protected those.

The big teakaway in Q4 2021 is that malware rose significantly, returning to normal levels. The reason might be the holiday season, but it’s most probably the fact that, at the end of last year, a lot of tech-based offices started reopening and offering employees to come back in, and thus there’s a bigger chance for network security controls to catch malware.