Like every year, Symantec has released its new edition of its annual report on cyber threats, the 24th, to be precise, which offers particularly interesting insights. The first fact that catches the eye is the reduction of private ransomware attacks. The reason is easy to guess, in this case: with the collapse of the value of the various cryptocurrencies, attacks of this type become less and less convenient and therefore the cybercriminals prefer to focus on more effective strategies. In particular, experts' concerns are the increase in formjacking attacks, which can yield much more to criminals. It is a type of attack that involves the injection of malicious code on e-commerce sites, a code that will record the access credentials and credit card data, then resold on the Dark Web. In 2018 were famous the cases of British Airways and Ticketmaster, when 380,000 and 40,000 profiles were violated, respectively.

Risks connected to the cloud are also increasing, a target increasingly attractive for cyber criminals since adoption has grown exponentially. According to the data presented by Symantec, the cloud is in effect the new PC: if until a few years ago were the computers of employees to represent the main vulnerability for companies, today are the wrong configurations of corporate clouds, as evidenced by the phenomenon of subtracted buckets, that is, the data containers hosted on Amazon's S3 and not adequately protected.

With the spread of IoT devices, more attacks on this type of devices increase, which in most cases do not offer an acceptable level of security. For example, consider the vulnerabilities discovered in Amazon's voice assistant and in Philips smart light bulbs, but also in more sensitive systems, such as SCADA, which control industrial machinery and have been targeted by hackers and spy services for some years.

Symantec concludes the report by proposing some data on apps for iOS and Android. There is no mention of viruses or malware, in this case, but of privacy risks that still escape many users: 44% of the Android app and 48% of those iOS requires access to the contact list and even the 45% of the app on Play Store requires access to the location of the device to work, even when not strictly necessary to the operation (as it could be in the case of a satellite navigator, for example).