The 2023 Cybersecurity Report

Every month, more than 62% of households in North America and Europe are exposed to threats that can be prevented by their Network Service Providers. Of the households affected, 59% have more than one device exposed to a cybersecurity threat. In just six months between April and October 2023, CUJO AI Sentry stopped close to 2 billion threats across tens of millions of home networks in North America and Europe.

The scale of CUJO AI’s deployments gives us a unique view of the consumer threat landscape, which includes botnet activities, malware, as well as adware or phishing campaigns.

Cybersecurity threats impacting consumers and their devices fall into two primary categories:

• IP Reputation, or connections to and from known malicious IP addresses, representing 47% of all threats.
• Safe Browsing, or attempts to access malicious websites, accounting for 53% of all threats.

Over 62% of all households attempted to visit malicious websites at least once every month. In July, this number reached a peak at 79%. In contrast, relatively few households (6%) were affected by all IP Reputation threats.

Attended devices, such as smartphones and computers, are more often (88% of threats) affected by Safe Browsing threats, while unattended devices (e.g., IoT devices) are mostly (87% of threats) affected by IP Reputation threats.

Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) are overwhelmingly (97% of threats) affected by Safe Browsing threats, which include malware distribution (55%), scams and phishing (31%), adware or spyware (6%), and other malicious websites.

Some very prolific and widespread adware campaigns are using malvertising, adware, and other techniques to run their malicious activities as a business.

Network-attached storage devices are affected by over 150 times more threats than an average device. DVRs are attacked over 30 times more often than an average device. Our data shows that ports associated with HTTP/S are targeted frequently. These ports are often opened to access and manage the device. Disreputable IP addresses targeting consumer devices are often related to malware distribution (38%) and malicious scanning (28%).