Latest Trends

When it comes to fraudulent instruction, professional services continues to be a target. The industry experiences the highest number of incidents overall, as well as the highest proportion of incidents from fraudulent instruction.

Business email compromise is on track overall to be up 14% from last year if incidents continue at this rate, but it’s still less than the highs we saw in 2020 and 2021. In terms of specific industries, Healthcare is up a bit from previous quarters and Professional Services is on track to be at the same level as last year.

When looking at our data exfiltration numbers, it’s important to note that there are a few ransomware variants that target smaller companies and are not known to exfiltrate. For this reason, it appears that we are seeing a slight decrease in the exfiltration rate, however overall, the threat of data exfiltration has remained fairly consistent from one quarter to the next.

Among the causes of ransomware attacks, remote desktop protocol (RDP) is down this quarter. This may be due in part to the fact that many threat actors are getting more advanced in anti-forensics and it may be difficult to determine how they accessed a given network. But equally important is the fact that securing ports is now part of Beazley’s underwriting controls process, which has brought down the incidents from failure to secure RDP.