TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan emerged as the top target of cyberattacks in Asia Pacific in the first seven months of this year, seeing an 80% increase in attacks compared to the same period last year.

Taiwan was hit by 224.8 billion cyberattacks in the first half of 2023, accounting for 55% of the total attacks targeting the Asia Pacific region. This means the country was attacked 15,000 times per second, wrote Business Next, citing a report by FortiGuard Labs, a research branch of the U.S. cybersecurity company Fortinet.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) and exploits of DoublePulsar, a backdoor implant tool, were the two most common types of attacks mounted by hackers, the research has shown.

A year-on-year rise of 63.5% was recorded in the exploitation of vulnerabilities in Taiwan, according to the study. FortiGuard Labs also pointed to more sophisticated and targeted ransomware activity globally that employed complex strains to infiltrate systems, including wiper malware that “wipes out” data from infected networks.

In addition, Taiwan detected botnet activity 120 million times in the first half of this year, while the incidence rate of botnet infection among organizations jumped 126% worldwide. The longer lingering time of botnets, about 1.5 months, before they were discovered and blocked is a cause for concern, the report cautioned.

Meanwhile, about 30% of the 138 cyber threat groups, or advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, tracked were found to be active during the period. Hacking groups have become more organized and adaptive to new technologies such as generative AI, rendering menacing activities more complex and harder to detect, according to FortiGuard Labs.