The Sophos 2021 Threat Report covers topic areas into which Sophos has gained insight from the work over the past 12 months by SophosLabs on malware and spam analysis, and by the Sophos Rapid Response, Cloud Security, and Data Science teams. These aspects of our daily work protecting customers provide insight into the threat landscape that can guide incident responders and IT security professionals on where they should direct their efforts to defend networks and endpoints in the coming year.

We've segmented the report into four main parts: Discussion of how ransomware has transformed itself, and where this threat is headed; analysis of the most common attacks large organizations face, and why these metaphorical canaries in the coal mine remain significant threats; how the emergence of a global pandemic affected information security in 2020; and a survey of the scope of attacks targeting platforms not traditionally considered part of an enterprise's attack surface.

To summarize the key takeaways from the report: