A new report from security company SonicWall highlights recent advancements by both cybercriminals and security professionals throughout 2016.
The 2017 Annual Threat Report was compiled with data collected by the SonicWall Global Response Intelligence Defense Threat Network, based on feeds from security sensors in almost 200 countries.
Here are four things to know about the report.
1. Ransomware usage increased by 167 times year-over-year in 2016. The number of ransomware attacks increased from 3.8 million in 2015 to 638 million in 2016.
2. The number of Internet of Things device-related attacks grew. SonicWall found a lack of IoT security allowed cybercriminals to initiate the most distributed denial-of-service attacks in history in 2016.
3. Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security encrypted traffic increased by 38 percent. SSL/TLS encryption increased from 5.3 trillion web connections in 2015 to 7.3 trillion in 2016.
4. Between 2014 and 2016, point-of-sale malware attacks decreased by 93 percent. SonicWall found the number of new POS malware variants declined by 88 percent year-over-year.
Click here to download the full report.