Threat Research

M-Trends 2020: Insights From the Front Lines

Today we release
M-Trends
2020, the 11th edition of our popular annual
FireEye Mandiant report. This latest M-Trends contains all of
the statistics, trends, case studies and hardening recommendations
that readers have to expect through the years—and more.

One of the most exciting takeaways from this year’s report: the
global median dwell time is now 56 days. That means the average
attacker is going undetected on a network for under two months—an
M-Trends first. This is a very promising statistic that
demonstrates how far we’ve come since 2011 when the global median
dwell time was 416 days. And yet, we know a sophisticated attacker
needs only a few days to gain access to the crown jewels, so there is
still plenty of room for improvement.

Another interesting statistic in the report is what we refer to as
"detection by source." For the first time since 2015, the
majority of organizations are being notified of compromises by
external sources (53 percent) over internal teams (47 percent). This
is more likely due to factors such as increases in law enforcement
notifications and compliance changes, and less likely due to internal
teams having lost a step.

There’s a whole lot more to look forward to in M-Trends 2020, including:

  • By the Numbers: Global median dwell time and detection by
    source are just the tip of the iceberg—we share a number of other
    statistics related to targeted industries, malware, threat
    techniques and more.
  • Newly Named APT Groups: Learn all about APT41, group
    responsible for carrying out Chinese state-sponsored espionage and
    financially motivated activity since as far back as 2012.
  • Trends: We take a deep dive into the latest trends involving
    malware families, monetizing ransomware, crimeware as a service, and
    malicious insiders.
  • Case Studies: With so many organizations moving to the cloud,
    we take a look at a breach involving cloud assets. We also take
    readers through a campaign where attackers were targeting gift
    cards.

While M-Trends 2020 contains plenty of new information, the
goal of M-Trends has remained the same since the beginning: to
arm security professionals with details on the latest attacks and
threats we are seeing during our engagements.

Download
the 11th edition of M-Trends today.