Trends in Web Threats: Attackers Were More Active During Holiday Season
Unit 42 tracked 533,000 malicious landing URL incidents from October-December 2021, showing web threats peaked during the holiday shopping season.
Unit 42 detected 533,452 malicious landing URL incidents (120,753 unique) and 2,906,875 malicious host URL incidents (165,255 unique) from October through December 2021. Threat activity peaked in November, likely tied to Black Friday in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Most malicious domains appeared to originate in the United States, followed by Russia and Germany. Personal sites, blogs, business sites, and shopping sites were the most common apparently benign entry points for attacks.
- 533,452 landing URL incidents; 120,753 unique across the holiday quarter.
- 2.9 million malicious host URL incidents; 165,255 unique.
- Activity peaked in November, likely due to Black Friday.
- Attackers hosted malicious code on fewer domains than landing URL domains observed.
- Most malicious domains geolocated to the US, Russia, and Germany.
- Vendors
- Palo Alto Networks
- Products
- Advanced URL Filtering
- Organizations
- Unit 42
- Countries
- United StatesRussiaGermany
Indicators of compromise
auto-extracted · verify before use · export allAll| Type | Indicator | Context |
|---|---|---|
| sha256 | 69ae50160f22494759f89e2b318fe3f1342a87eeeeb4829fefaeafa4a560d57e | 0200 Indicators of Compromise Malicious Web Skimmer SHA256: 69ae50160f22494759f89e2b318fe3f1342a87eeeeb4829fefaeafa4a560d57e Acknowledgements We would like to thank Billy Melicher, Ale |
From the original article
9 min read at unit42.paloaltonetworks.com
Customers’ rising online shopping habits throughout the holiday season are well known, and it seemed likely that cybercriminals would want to capitalize. As we continue to track and observe trends in web threats and how attackers take advantage of them, we were able to use our web threat detection module to quantify the spike in malicious URLs during the most recent holiday season.
By Tao Yan, Jin Chen, Taojie Wang, Cecilia Hu · unit42.paloaltonetworks.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.