It was the last year of the 2010s, and cybercriminals let the world know they meant business. From an increase in enterprise-focused threats to diversification of sophisticated hacking, evasion, and stealth techniques to aggressive adware aimed at Androids, the 2019 threat landscape was shaped by a cybercrime industry that was all grown up. While Malwarebytes observed a relative plateau in the overall volume of threat detections in 2019, our telemetry showed a clear trend toward industrialization. Global Windows malware detections on business endpoints increased by 13 percent, and a bifurcation of attack techniques split threat categories neatly between those targeting consumers and those affecting organizations’ networks. The Trojan-turned-botnets Emotet and TrickBot made a return in 2019 to terrorize organizations alongside new ransomware families, such as Ryuk, Sodinokibi, and Phobos. In addition, a flood of hack tools and registry key disablers made a splashy debut in our top detections, a reflection of the greater sophistication used by today’s business-focused attackers.
