Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), the leader in cloud security, today released its annual mid-year roundup report. The findings reveal that in just six months, Trend Micro blocked over 12.4 million email threats in Egypt.
 
The report also revealed that Trend Micro solutions blocked nearly 1 million malicious URLs being accessed by users. Cybercriminals shifted their focus from January through June to take advantage of global interest in the pandemic. The risk to businesses was compounded by security gaps created by a completely remote workforce.
 
“The pandemic has dominated all of our lives during the first half of 2020, but it’s not slowing down the cybercriminals,” said Ashraf Serag, Country Manager, Trend Micro Egypt. “IT leaders must continue to adapt their cybersecurity strategies to account for increased threats to their new normal. That means protecting remote endpoints, cloud systems, user credentials and VPN systems, as well as refreshing training courses to turn that newly dispersed workforce into a more effective first line of defense.”
 
“Trend Micro is strongly committed to protect the digital estates of organizations across Egypt, and we will continue these efforts by bringing new innovations to the market.” Added Serag.
 
The Trend Micro mid-year round up report also cited over 235,000 malware attacks were detected in Egypt, while over 6.8 million malicious Mobile Apps were found.
 
In total, globally Trend Micro blocked 27.8 billion cyber threats in the first half of 2020, 93% of which were email-borne. Business Email Compromise (BEC) detections increased by 18% from the second half of 2019, in part due to scammers trying to capitalize on home workers being more exposed to social engineering.
 
Among all the threats in the first half of the year, ransomware was a constant factor. Although the number of detected ransomware threats decreased, Trend Micro saw a 36% increase in new ransomware families compared to the same time last year.
 
Trend Micro also observed a 16% increase in vulnerabilities disclosed in industrial control systems (ICS), compared to the first half of 2019, which could create major challenges for smart factory owners and other organizations running IIoT environments.
 
To effectively protect dispersed corporate networks, Gartner recommends businesses “refine security monitoring capabilities to reflect an operating environment where network traffic patterns, data and system access vectors have changed due to increased remote and mobile operations.[1]” Trend Micro XDR helps customers do exactly that by correlating security events across the entire IT environment, which is critical for holistic protection in the second half of 2020.