Fortinet has released its semi-annual Global Threat Landscape Report from FortiGuard Labs. The report highlights key findings from the first half of 2023, revealing shifts in cyber-threat trends and providing insights to help organizations enhance their security strategies. Additionally, last week Fortinet unveiled FortiGate 90G to address such cyber-security issues.
FortiGuard Labs noted a decline in organizations detecting ransomware attacks, with only 13 percent detecting ransomware in the first half of 2023, compared to 22 percent five years ago. However, this decline does not signify reduced threats. Instead, attacks are becoming more targeted and sophisticated, aiming to maximize returns on investment.
Fortinet’s analysis of exploitation activity data supports the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), indicating that vulnerabilities with high EPSS scores are 327 times more likely to be exploited within seven days than others. This information empowers security teams to prioritize patching efforts effectively, minimizing their organization’s risk exposure.
The Red Zone concept continues to help Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) prioritize patching efforts. The proportion of vulnerabilities actively attacked on endpoints remained around 8.3 percent in the first half of 2023, showing minimal change from the second half of 2022.
FortiGuard Labs tracked active Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups, revealing that 30 percent of the 138 cyber-threat groups MITRE tracks were active in the first half of 2023. This trend underlines the evolving nature of APT groups and their impact on cyber-threat landscapes.
In an effort to combat such cyber-threats, last week Fortinet announced the launch of FortiGate 90G, the first Secure SD-WAN appliance and NGFW with the new security processing unit 5 (SP5) ASIC that delivers industry-leading AI-powered threat protection performance, scalability and power efficiency at a cost-effective price. This addition to Fortinet’s Secure Networking portfolio expands the company’s ability to deliver consistent security, unified management, analytics and FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services across the entire hybrid network.
The new FortiGate 90G series of next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) delivers enterprise-grade secure networking capabilities, such as hybrid mesh firewall, SD-WAN, and SD-Branch, to distributed edges. FortiGate 90G is also the foundation for customers’ SASE and zero-trust journey to enable secure internet access, secure private access and secure SaaS access.
FortiGate 90G is fully integrated with FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services, providing advanced intrusion prevention for deep packet inspection of SSL/TLS traffic, web security services, such as DNS and URL filtering for blocking of access to malicious domains and URLs and content security, such as inline sandboxing to stop zero-day and other file-based threats.
