A Cyber Revolution: Advanced Attacks Increasing in EMEA Reflect
Political Tension
[html]Financial, geopolitical and economical changes made 2015 a very busy
year for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region,
particularly in the cyber realm. FireEye has been monitoring these
shifting cyber trends and has identified considerable evolutions to
the EMEA threat landscape when comparing the second half of the year
to the first half.
To share our observations, we present the href="https://www2.fireeye.com/WEB-2016-RPT-ATR-EMEA.html">FireEye
Regional Advanced Threat Report for EMEA 2H2015, a follow on
report from our href="/content/fireeye-www/en_US/blog/executive-perspective/2015/09/regional_advancedth.html">mid-2015
publication. This report provides an overview of the advanced
persistent threats (APT) targeting computer networks in EMEA during
the second half of 2015, and also contains various other key
observations, including:
- Cyber attacks continue to reflect ongoing “real world” events.
In the second half of 2015, with political tensions in Turkey and
financial tensions on European markets with uncertain outlooks, we
observed similar patterns in cyber threats. - Turkey, Spain,
Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Great Britain represent
more than 60 percent of total alerts associated with advanced threat
activity seen in 2H2015. - Ransomware continues to pose a
threat to organisations, and the malware development lifecycle is so
short that many organisations continue to struggle at defending
against compromises. - Cybercriminals continue to utilise
macro embedded Microsoft Office documents to deliver malicious
payloads. - Advanced threats are increasingly targeting
governments and the financial services industry, and there has been
a significant increase in attacks targeting the aerospace and
defense industry.