MDR Analyst Report issued: Authorities asked to enhance cybersecurity steps for digital infrastructure protection

ISLAMABAD: An international cybersecurity firm has advised Pakistani authorities to continuously enhance cybersecurity measures to protect country’s digital infrastructure from diverse and evolving threats.

This has been specified by the Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response (MDR) team in its latest MDR Analyst Report issued on Friday.

The report revealed a mixed landscape of threats during a comparison of the cyberattack statistics between Pakistan's first quarters of 2023 and 2024. According to Kaspersky telemetry, backdoor-attacks saw a moderate increase in 2024 indicating persistent vulnerabilities in digital infrastructures. The most notable surge was observed in spyware attacks, showing an increase of 300% of cases during first quarter of 2024 as compare to first quarter of 2023, highlighting growing concerns over data exfiltration.

While banking malware attacks shows a more than 50% of decline from 2023. These fluctuations emphasize the imperative for continuous enhancement of cybersecurity measures to protect Pakistan's digital infrastructure from diverse and evolving threats, report added.

Hafeez Rehman, Technical group manager at Kaspersky informed that in 2023, Kaspersky detected a smaller number of high-severity incidents, but observed a simultaneous increase in the number of medium and low severity ones. It’s important to understand that the low number of high-severity incidents does not necessarily indicate low damage.

Targeted attacks are now planned more carefully, and become more dangerous. Therefore, we recommend the use of effective automated cybersecurity solutions managed with the help of experienced SOC analysts, Hafeez added.

The latest MDR Analyst Report further disclosed that frequency of high-severity incidents with direct human involvement exceeded two per day in 2023. The trend has been observed across all industries with financial, IT, government, and industrial sectors at the top of the list.

According to the report, 22.9% of all detected high-severity incidents were recorded in the government sector. IT companies came second (15.4%), closely followed by financial and industrial companies that reported 14.9% and 11.8% of incidents respectively.

The annual Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Analyst Report provides information about the reported incidents, their nature, and their distribution by industry and geographic region. It also highlights the most common tactics, techniques and tools attackers used in the past year. These results are based on analysis of MDR incidents detected by the Kaspersky Security Operations Centre (SOC).

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024