I recently heard Elliot Lewis, Dell’s Chief Security Architect, comment that “The average new viruses per day is about 5-10k appearing new each day.” To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure how to process that type of volume of viruses. It felt pretty unbelievable to me even though, I figured he was right.
Today, I came across this amazing internet attack map by Norse which illustrates a small portion of the attacks that are happening on the internet in real time. I captured a screenshot of the map below, but you really need to check out the live map to get a feel for how many internet attacks are happening. It’s astounding to watch.
For those tech nerds out there, here’s the technical description of what’s happening on the map:
Every second, Norse collects and analyzes live threat intelligence from darknets in hundreds of locations in over 40 countries. The attacks shown are based on a small subset of live flows against the Norse honeypot infrastructure, representing actual worldwide cyber attacks by bad actors. At a glance, one can see which countries are aggressors or targets at the moment, using which type of attacks (services-ports).
It’s worth noting that these are the attacks that are happening. Just because something is getting attacked doesn’t mean that the attack was successful. A large majority of the attacks aren’t successful. However, when you see the volume of attacks (and that map only shows a small portion of them) is so large, you only need a small number of them to be successful to wreak a lot of havoc.
If this type of visualization doesn’t make you stop and worry just a little bit, then you’re not human. There’s a lot of crazy stuff going on out there. It’s actually quite amazing that with all the crazy stuff that’s happening, the internet works as well as it does.
Hopefully this visualization will wake up a few healthcare organizations to be just a little more serious about their IT security.