SonicWall Inc., the network security provider that spun out of Dell Technologies Inc. in 2016, today released its 2019 Cyber Threat Report, and the results don’t make happy reading for security personnel.

The findings, which were gleaned from the company’s network of more than 1 million sensors around the world, finds that malware attacks grew 22 percent last year to more than 10.5 billion, while ransomware staged a resurgence, with 11 percent growth. Even worse were intrusion attempts, which totaled 3.9 trillion, up 30 percent, and attacks on web applications, up 56 percent to nearly 27 million.

Malware attacks, which were thought to have been on the decline as recently as 2016, have surged by a third since then to a record 10.5 billion attacks in 2018, the company said. In the U.S., the increase was 62 percent, said SonicWall Chief Executive Bill Conner. “An average customer experienced about 25,000 malware attacks last year,” he said.

But this isn’t your father’s malware. “Fileless” malware, which lodges itself in the main memory and doesn’t leave a traceable file on storage media, are becoming a growing problem, Conner said. This type of malware evades traditional signature-based detection and is nearly impossible to identify before it begins to make trouble.

Malware authors are also increasingly targeting entry points other than ports 80 and 443, which are standard for web traffic. Attackers are betting that victims have failed to protect those ports on their firewalls, enabling payloads to go undetected. SonicWall said 19.2 percent of malware attacks came through nonstandard ports in 2018, up from the 17.7 percent the previous year.

“Attackers clearly realize that most people don’t have deep packet inspection turned on for nonstandard ports,” Conner said. “We have security to prevent this, but people have to use it.”

Another troubling trend: Attackers are using encryption such as Transport Layer Security and Secure Sockets Layer to hide their payloads. SonicWall detected more than 2.8 million encrypted attacks in 2018, up 27 percent over the previous year. More and more website operators are using encryption thanks in part to urging from search engine providers. The downside is that attackers can use those public encryption keys to scramble their deliveries.

There’s some good news, though. Ransomware attacks declined sharply in countries such as India and the U.K., which have been hit hard in the past and have doubled down on prevention. Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a user’s primary storage media, rendering a device useless without a decryption code that is obtainable only by paying a ransom. The flip side is that countries that haven’t been hit as hard saw a sharp uptick in ransomware incidents. In the U.S., attacks jumped 62 percent despite high awareness levels.

Cryptomining hijacks, in which attackers compromise victims’ computers and turn them into cryptocurrency mining drones, have been on a steady decline in step with the falling value of cryptocurrencies. Phishing attacks are also down about 4 percent, although SonicWall still detected 26 million of them last year.

But the survey also touches on what is likely to be the next great wave: attacks targeting “internet of things” devices. SonicWaill said it recorded 32.7 million IoT attacks in 2018, up nearly 220 percent over the previous year.

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