Security News > 2020 > April > Nigerian Threat Actors Specializing in BEC Attacks Continue to Evolve
The Nigerian business email compromise threat actors referred to as SilverTerrier have intensified assaults on multiple industries and should be considered an established threat, Palo Alto Networks says.
SilverTerrier attacks were linked to roughly 400 individual threat actors in 2018, but that number jumped to 480 in 2019.
The number of BEC attacks Palo Alto Networks observed last year averaged at 92,739 assaults per month, representing a 172% increase from 2018, when the average was 34,039 incidents per month.
Most of the attacks leveraged email protocols to reach target networks, with SMTP traffic accounting for 69% of attacks observed in 2019, and POP3 and IMAP accounting for 26% and 2.8% of attacks, respectively.
Only 1.9% of attacks were delivered via web browsing and 0.3% via FTP. In 2019, Palo Alto Networks identified 27,310 samples of SilverTerrier malware, most of which were commodity malware tools.