Each year, IBM Security X-Force — our in-house team of cybersecurity experts and remediators — mines billions of data points to expose today’s most urgent security statistics and trends. This year’s IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index presents an uncomfortable truth: as businesses, institutions and governments continue to adapt to a fast-changing global market—including hybrid and cloud-based work environments—threat actors remain adept at exploiting such shifts. In 2021, IBM Security X-Force saw how threat actors opportunistically used a shifting landscape to adopt tactics and techniques to successfully infiltrate organizations across the globe.
The IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index maps new trends and attack patterns we observed and analyzed from our data—drawing from billions of data points ranging from network and endpoint detection devices, incident response (IR) engagements, domain name tracking and more. This report represents the culmination of that research based on data collected from January to December 2021. We offer these findings as a resource to IBM clients, researchers in the security industry, policy makers, the media and to the broader community of security professionals and business leaders. Given the volatile landscape and the evolution of both threat types and threat vectors, you need threat intelligence insights to stay ahead of attackers and fortify your critical assets more than ever.
Maintaining properly hardened systems, enacting effective password policies and ensuring policy compliance is critical to maintaining a robust cloud security posture. Did you know between 2019 and 2020 there was a 3,000% surge in IoT malware activity alone? Our X-Force Research team has joined forces to provide IT security leaders guidance on best practices to stay ahead of these threats. Read the full report to learn how to better equip your organization to mitigate against these cyber security risks.