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Publication of our annual report is coming soon. Editing is moving forward at full speed, but in the meantime we’d like to share some statistics concerning 2018. This statistics provide a big bicture of an IT security landscape in Poland and as well conclusions about major trends in this area. For many years already CERT Polska has incorporated eCSIRT.net incident classification (now, the sixth version marked as mkVI)¹, which defines pretty well different incident categories.

In 2018 operators of CERT Polska received 19439 incident reports. We carefully analyzed and categorized all of them. Among these reports, 5675 were the reason to register incident. Our team created 3739 security incidents, what gives on the average over 10 incidents created daily. The remaining a dozen or so reports not assigned to any incident were irrelevant or can be considered as automatic alerts sent from several alerting systems. In case of the latter our activities were connected with supplying our n6 platform² and other analytic tools as well.

Often, one incident can be connected with many incident reports, e.g. three different entities report the same phishing site.

In the table below we present incidents handled by our team, divided into categories according to eCSIRT.net classification.

Category	Incidents	%
Abusive Content	431	11,53
Spam	419	11,21
Harmful Speech	5	0,13
Child/Sexual/Violence/…	0	0
Unclassified	7	0,19
Malicious Code	862	23,05
Virus	4	0,11
Worm	0	0
Trojan	117	3,13
Spyware	0	0
Dialer	1	0,03
Rootkit	1	0,03
Unclassified	739	19,76
Information Gathering	101	2,7
Scanning	80	2,14
Sniffing	1	0,03
Social Engineering	7	0,19
Unclassified	13	0,35
Intrusion Attempts	153	4,09
Exploiting of known Vulnerabilities	30	0,8
Login attempts	37	0,99
New attack signature	0	0
Unclassified	86	2,3
Intrusions	125	3,34
Privileged Account Compromise	11	0,29
Unprivileged Account Compromise	21	0,56
Application Compromise	35	0,94
Bot	4	0,11
Unclassified	54	1,44
Availability	49	1,31
DoS	7	0,19
DDoS	35	0,94
Sabotage	0	0
Outage (no malice)	1	0,03
Unclassified	6	0,16
Information Content Security	46	1,23
Unauthorised access to information	21	0,56
Unauthorised modification of information	13	0,35
Unclassified	12	0,32
Fraud	1878	50,23
Unauthorized use of resources	1	0,03
Copyright	8	0,21
Masquerade	43	1,15
Phishing	1655	44,26
Unclassified	171	4,57
Vulnerable	69	1,85
Open for abuse	14	0,37
Unclassified	55	1,47
Other	25	0,67

Table 1. Incidents handled by CERT Polska, divided into eCSIRT.net categories

 

In 2018 CERT Polska created 17,5% more incidents comparing to 2017. Most of them were categorized as phishing, malware or spam. According to the data from 2017 we observed slight change on the podium in that infamous ranking, because then the first three places went as follows: phishing, malware, intrusions. Proportion of phishing incidents remained on similar level comparing to 2017 and reached 44%, which was firmly dominant result above remaining categories. Most popular scenarios were connected with phishings on foreign servers targeting Polish financial institutions (mostly banks). Another popular scenarios were related to phishings targeting services like Netflix or PayPal served from compromised Polish servers. Leading theme behind those attacks was premium users’ credentials theft or simply stealing money from internet bank account. Many scenarios concerned also selling goods on advertisement websites at the attractive prices. Main objective of these operations was to persuade users to enter sensitive data on fake websites, impersonating online payment platforms like Dotpay or PayU.

 

 

In 2018 we also observed fake online shops business, which has been visibly developed by some actors. In last year number of incidents related to fake online shops tripled, comparing to 2017. At this point, we’d like to thank all users aware of this kind of threat, who report about such activities more often and more eagerly every year. Attackers tried to find as many victims as possible, e.g. by advertising their shops in social media and popular search engines, where they were optimizing their shops’ position on the list of search results.

 

 

The second most popular category of incidents was malware. It’s a broad category with many subcategories, but usually we marked incidents related to malware as “unclassified”. Firstly, because in many scenarios more than one malware family was used, incorporating variety of methods and attack techniques. Secondly, we registered significant number of incidents concerning ransomware, which unfortunately don’t have its own category in eCSIRT.net classification. In that aspect the classification isn’t perfect yet, but we hope that in the next revision it will be updated.

A vast number of malware incident reports was related to attacks on Polish users. Popular scenarios concerning emails with fake invoice, delivery details or claim for payment (or additional payment) continued spreading in different versions. These emails usually contained malicious attachment as a script, document with macros or link leading to some website distributing malware (e.g. banker or mobile banker app, depending on User-Agent HTTP header).

 

 

This year for the first time we publish classification of incidents divided into Polish economy sectors. You can find detailed information in the table below. At a glance significant number of incidents is marked as Other (3 out of 4 incidents were classified to this category). These were mostly incidents concerning individuals or private entities. Next places in the classification belong to banking sector and public administration. Total number of the latter was little, comparing to the Other category. We are aware that presented classification is far from ideal. However, we had created this classification before CERT Polska has been designated as one of the three national-level CSIRTs under National Cybersecurity System law. Now, when the law is in force, we’ll be able to specify categories of this classification to reflect security of different economy sectors in a better way.

Sector	Incidents	%
IT infrastructure	29	0,78
Public health care	13	0,35
Banking	643	17,2
Other financial institutions	62	1,66
Energy industry	20	0,53
Transport	51	1,36
Public administration	85	2,27
Water supply	2	0,05
Other	2834	75,8
Total	3739	100

Table 2. Incidents handled by CERT Polska divided into Polish economy sectors

 

More conclusions you’ll find in our annual report (coming soon). You’re warmly welcomed to follow CERT Polska’s blog and our profiles in social media to be up-to-date with latest news concerning publication of our report.

During last year we have collaborated with Hatching.io on improving the open source Cuckoo Sandbox. The main works were focused on porting advanced mechanisms for memory analysis which were developed internally by our team in the previous years. The public release of the onemon marks the last stage of this collaboration. We are proud that results of this work are now available to the security community.
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