The Last Two Months of 2021 Saw Web Threats Increase by 130%

The internet is a great place to find information that is highly technical and advanced without needing to go to a library where such information might have restricted access for certain folks. In spite of the fact that this is the case, the interconnected nature of this system makes it highly vulnerable to several threats, with web threats that some unsuspecting users infect their systems with easily spreading through the network to infect several other systems that are connected to it.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that research that Paloaltonetworks recently conducted, showed that web threats on the rise. They increase by 133% in just November and December of last year when compared to numbers that were noted in the two months prior to them. November was the worst month so far based on the ratio of unique new URLs and all threats. The threat count in November was as high as 833,924, which represents an almost threefold increase from the 361,000 threats found in October.

Unique URLs that contained malware only increased by 24,000, though, going from 60,440 to 84,000 in the span of a month. This seems to suggest that each individual new URL contains far more threats that people would need to endure, but in spite of the fact that this is the case there doesn’t seem to be much work being done to keep these threats at bay which can result in them increasing even more exponentially during the next few months of 2022.

However, December saw an increase in unique URLs that had threats in them, going up to just under 94,000, but the total number of threats decreased to just under 750,000. That indicates that November was a bit of an outlier, although this does not excuse the lack of security advancements that are being made. November and December are popular months for online shopping due to holiday sales, so the uptick in threat activity might have been a byproduct of more people spending money on the internet.
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