FireEye’s Kenneth Geers: IT Officers Seek Clues as Cyber Attacks Proliferate

Evolving tactics and the speed of how the number of cyber attacks has grown are leaving infrastructure vulnerable as technology officers increasingly scramble for new ways to predict a strike, FireEye Senior Global Threat Analyst Kenneth Geers has warned.

“Across the board, we are seeing a global expansion of APTs, malware, CnC infrastructure and the use of publicly available tools to facilitate the attack process,” Geers said Thursday.

“The global scale of the threat has put cyber defenders in the very difficult position of not having any clue where the next attack will come from,” he added.

FireEye has published a new Advanced Threat Report that found an attack was most likely to occur over the Web rather than email at a global ratio of five-to-one.

Attacks were recorded in 206 countries and territories in 2013, 22 more than the previous year, with perpetrators favoring Java and Internet Explorer as zero-day platforms, the report says.

The U.S., South Korea and Canada were the top countries hit by APTs in 2013 and FireEye identified government, services/consulting and technology as the three sectors most targeted by malware.