so this is something that we have heard time and again that everyone tells you yes cyber attacks are rising they’ve gone up by x percentage we say that as well but then very few companies are actually able to tell you why exactly are these cyber attacks really going up right these are these are points that are never exactly evaluated some vendors might tell you oh yes it’s because the number of vulnerabilities have gone up or you know people are really worrying about people are you know not secure enough or the infrastructure is not secure enough that is why this particular you know cyber attacks are going up but that’s not the reason here the actual reason is something there are five reasons to summarize everything rather in five points so there’s something to do with democratization of cyber attacks what do we mean by that right so democratization means now the tools that are uh you know that used to be earlier available only to a few sophisticated evolved actors is now available for literally everyone and you can actually uh you know target an entity with a cyber attack for as low as seven to ten dollars so you can imagine right cyber attacks have essentially become more affordable and more players are getting involved for various reasons as well rise of apt-trained hackers who have become independent right so some groups which we’ve seen in parts of eastern europe some parts of southeast asia where they were trained by these state-sponsored hackers have gone on their own now and they are either offering their services to these very apt groups or they are sort of you know operating on their own and they are figuring out cyber attacks on their own or they are really going after certain targets on their own so this has added a huge volume of cyber attacks again to uh the overall rise that we’ve seen uh in the last year then apt groups are monitoring monetizing cyber attacks again because the budgets were cut during the pandemic like everything else the funding sources kind of dried up at that point because you know other things became priority for these very governments which were involved in these cyber attacks or you know permeating the cyber attacks through these very apt groups so they were left to actually monetize it on their own so they started targeting uh sort of you know non-state entities and other actors or rather other entities just to get ransom to keep their operations going which is also the reason why you saw a lot of these hackers going independent because they were not getting funded anymore so they didn’t find it very sustainable to stay along or rather hold on to the apt group while they were not getting paid for that matter so it’s a very organized operation that’s the point i want to make out there leakage of malware from different sources again the scene leakage is happening from academic institutions or defense labs and where have you because when we do a code level analysis we see some genetic footprints of certain facilities which you would not like to name here but then again at some point in time in the evolution or during the genesis this malware actually passed through these particular laboratories that were out there or they were modified in certain form of manner by certain uh you know laboratories or facilities which are connected either with academic research or they’re connected with governments so you know again we are not speculating here in terms of why this has happened but this has happened that’s a fact again that like that we would like to uh place on record so with large number of malware available again democratization that’s another point and then a lot of actors coming in that added to the whole problem um rapid expansion of unprotected thread surfaces again now we are almost at the end of the pandemic but during the pandemic we did see a lot of people working from all kinds of locations unmonitored environments and suddenly these digital transmission sort of you know projects which essentially involved these you know remote monitoring of infrastructure and the likes took off in a certain way a lot of devices iot devices were added without adequate testing and all that and all that added out added to this huge chunk of you know digital sort of uh real estate that was available to these hackers to really leverage and do something with and they didn’t wait for it