2014 cyber attack overview. - The NTT Innovation Institute (NTT) has published its annual report on cyber threats in the world. Its analysis is based on the attacks observed by its clients in 2014. The report provides a global threat visualisation on a daily basis in the context of more than 6 billion cyber attacks identified throughout the world in 2014. The main conclusions are as follows for 2014: - At a global level, 85% of identified corporate vulnerabilities resided within end users and user systems and not on servers; - The level of attack systematically fell during weekends and holidays, in other words, when employees are not in the office and their systems have been turned off or are not being used; - Finance is still the number one target of cyber pirates, with 18% of all attacks identified in this domain. Due to the financial sector being the most popular target, most of the NTT Innovation Institute's interventions take place in this field and directly involve bank transfer fraud, as well as phishing and spear-phishing; - Attacks on business & professional services increased from 9% to 15%. This increase illustrates the new methods used by cyber pirates to achieve their ends, given that the major groups in this field are better protected and the cyber pirates try to get round security by way of subcontractors or more vulnerable service providers; - in the education sector, malware attacks (destructive software containing viruses, worms and Trojan horses) fell from 42% to 35% but despite this 7% decline compared to the rate for 2013, the education sector continues to attract a third of all malware attacks; - Across the world, 56% of attacks against the NTT global client base originated from IP addresses within the United States, a 7% jump compared to 2013 (49%). - More than 80% of the vulnerabilities targeted by exploit kits in 2014 were detected and flagged up in 2013 and 2014. Exploit kits are software packages containing programs that enable damaging intrusions that exploit a computer security weakness in a given user system or software; - 76% of identified vulnerabilities throughout all systems in the enterprise sphere were more than 2 years old, and almost 9% of them were over 10 years old. - 26% of web application attacks were committed by injection (a process involving the injection of data or rogue software) this figure increased by 90% compared to rates for 2013; - The majority of counter cyber piracy operations mainly involved three areas: rogue software, DDoS and system violations. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks seek to deny the use of services to legitimate users or make these services unavailable; - Between 2013 and 2014, however, the NTT group witnessed the number of interventions being made to tackle DDoS attacks fall from 31% to 18%; - The proportion of interventions made regarding malware attacks rose from 43% to 52%; - Basic controls are not always systematically carried out by companies. Therefore, 75% of the latter do not have an intervention plan in the event of cyber attacks being carried out. (Isabelle Lamberty)