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Public sector most targeted by malicious hackers, MacAfee finds

Fifth Domain: From 2016 to 2017, hackers around the world most often targeted the public sector in their attacks, according to publicly disclosed incidents compiled in McAfee Labs’ recent quarterly threat report.

According to the report, the health and public sectors comprised 41 percent of all publicly disclosed security incidents in the third quarter of 2017. North America still saw higher attacks on its health care sector than any other, but attacks on the Asian, European, Oceanian and African public sectors made it the top sector for attacks in the latter part of 2017.

“The third quarter revealed that attackers’ threat designs continue to benefit from the dynamic, benign capabilities of platform technologies like PowerShell, a reliable recklessness on the part of individual phishing victims, and what seems to be an equally reliable failure of organizations to patch known vulnerabilities with available security updates,” said Raj Samani, McAfee’s chief scientist. “Although attackers will always seek ways to use newly developed innovations and established platforms against us, our industry perhaps faces a greater challenge in the effort to influence individuals and organizations away from becoming their own worst enemies.”

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