Taiwan most targeted by cyberattacks in Asia-Pacific

Taipei, Nov. 12 (CNA) Each of Taiwan's organizations was the target of an average of 4,129 cyberattacks per week during the third quarter of 2024, the most of any economy in the Asia-Pacific region, cybersecurity service provider Check Point said in a report Tuesday.

The 4,129-cyberattack total was up 44 percent from the same period a year earlier, a surge that was nonetheless lower than that for most regions around the world.

The three sectors hit the most in Taiwan during the quarter were hardware vendors, the government/military sector, and manufacturing, which were attacked an average of 7,046, 5,357 and 4,175 times weekly, respectively, between May and October, the report said.

Check Point did not list other economies within the Asia-Pacific that faced high numbers of attacks.

Regionally, the Asia-Pacific had an average of 2,863 weekly attacks, up 55 percent from the same period a year earlier, while the global average of weekly attacks soared 75 percent from the third quarter of 2023 to an all-time high of 1,876, Check Point data showed.

"The surge underscores the trend that virtual threats are becoming more frequent and sophisticated," the company said in the report.

The most targeted sectors worldwide were education/research, which received 3,828 weekly attacks per organization on average, followed by the government/military sector at 2,553, and the health care sector at 2,434.

The most attacked region globally in the third quarter was Africa, which averaged 3,370 weekly attacks per organization, up 90 percent from the previous year.

Latin America pulled up just behind the Asia-Pacific region with 2,844 weekly attacks on average for the quarter, up 72 percent year-over-year.

Attacks on organizations in Europe and North America, were generally lower, at 1,557 and 1,298 weekly attacks per organization, respectively, up 86 percent and 55 percent year-over-year.

The company said the attacks generally came in the form of phishing and ransomware, indicating that ransomware "remained a formidable challenge."

For the quarter, the brands most frequently used for phishing attacks were Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Check Point said the statistics and data used in its reports present data detected by the Check Point ThreatCloud AI platform, "which analyzes big data telemetry and millions of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) daily."

Its threat intelligence database is sourced from 150,000 connected networks, millions of endpoint devices, Check Point Research (CP), and dozens of external feeds, the company said.