Authors:
Alexander Ivanyuk — Senior Director, Technology
Irina Artioli — Cyber Protection Evangelist, TRU
The Acronis Cyberthreats Update covers current cyberthreat activity and trends, as observed by Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) and sensors. Figures presented here were gathered in January of this year and reflect threats that we detected as well as news stories from the public domain. This report represents a global outlook and is based on more than one million unique endpoints distributed around the world.
Incidents of the month
A recent vulnerability in OpenAI's ChatGPT, termed the "Time Bandit" jailbreak, allows users to bypass the platform's safety measures and access information on sensitive topics such as weapon creation, nuclear information and malware development. Discovered by cybersecurity and AI researcher David Kuszmar, this flaw exploits ChatGPT's "temporal confusion," enabling the model to be manipulated into providing detailed instructions on typically restricted subjects. For instance, by convincing the model it was assisting a programmer from the 18th century, ChatGPT provided detailed guidance on creating polymorphic Rust-based malware.
This incident underscores the importance of robust security measures in AI models and the need for clear channels for researchers to report vulnerabilities. It also highlights the challenges in ensuring that AI systems cannot be manipulated into providing harmful information.
January malware detections
In January, Acronis Cyber Protect blocked almost one million malware threats on endpoints — a 5% decrease from December.
The below tables show the percentage of Acronis clients that had at least one malware threat blocked at the endpoint, as well as the normalized percentage of clients with at least one malware detection. The higher the percentage, the higher the risk of a workload in that country being attacked by malware.
Protection
The aforementioned threats can be detected and mitigated with solutions from Acronis.
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud protects against both known and never-before-seen threats through a multilayered protection approach. This includes behavior-based detection, AI- / ML-trained detections and anti-ransomware heuristics, which can detect and block encryption attempts and roll back any tampered files automatically without any user interaction.
Additional advanced email security and URL filtering can help you protect against social engineering threats. And your Acronis #CyberFit score helps you quickly identify systems that need attention, while the integrated patch management makes updating your software to the latest versions simple.
Advanced Security + Extended Detection and Response (XDR) for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud brings the visibility needed to understand attacks while simplifying the context for administrators and enabling efficient remediation of any threats.
