Israel was hit by cyberattacks more frequently than the countries of France, Japan, the United States, and Germany in 2021, a report by Israeli cybersecurity provider Check Point found.
Cyberattacks directed towards Israel grew 92% from 2020 to 2021, while they increased by roughly 50% globally, the findings show. 2021 also saw upwards momentum, with the second half of the year bringing the total global average to 925 cyber attacks a week.
Different countries and industries suffered from cyberattacks at different rates, as Check Point reviewed data from across 16 industries and nearly 100 countries.
The most impacted industry was education/research, followed by government/military, communications firms and internet service providers – all of which saw an increase of cyberattacks by at least 47%. The industry sector that saw the largest spike in attacks was software vendors, who saw a staggering 146% increase in cyberattacks.
While the largest growth in cyberattack prevalence was in North America (61%) and Europe (68%), the two regions were dealt the least amount of attacks by far – between 500 to 650 per week per organization. Cyberattacks in the most prevalent region, Africa, went up just 13% year-over-year, though they withstood nearly 1,600 attacks every week per organization – nearly three times more than the USA/Europe’s baseline average.
The Asia-Pacific region suffered approximately 1,350 attacks per week at a 25% year-over-year increase, while South America had nearly 1,120 attacks per week at a 38% increase.
Ethiopia recorded the most cyberattacks, with a whopping 7,518 attacks on average every week. Mongolia – a country of just under 3.3 million people – recorded the second-most cyberattacks against them with 3,744, which was actually down 30% from 2020. Bhutan – which last year entered a normalization agreement with Israel via the Abraham Accords – tallied the third-highest number of cyberattacks (3,687) from any country regardless of population, though the rate of attacks actually decreased by 17%. Bhutan has a population of just over 770,000 people, according to the World Bank.
Bolivia (3,479) and Georgia (2,925) rounded out the top five most cyber-attacked nations of 2021.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Check Point is a multinational provider of IT security products, such as network security, endpoint security, cloud security, mobile security, data security and security management. The company has approximately 5,400 employees worldwide, according to its website.