Is someone at IBM a big comic book fan? The name “X-Force” is popularly associated with a superhero team from Marvel Comics, but IBM has chosen it as a moniker for many of the company’s digital security offerings, such as its penetration testing service, X-Force Red, or its X-Force IRIS incident response team. Mysterious branding decisions aside, last week IBM released the 2019 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, a summary of the changing trends in cyberattacks, derived from analyzing trillions of individual security events from around the world.

These events range from a simple probing port scan to sophisticated malware attacks. Together, they show a changing trend in attackers’ methods over the course of 2018, driven by their desire to get the most bang for their buck—literally. Even though intrusions by state actors or hacktivists get a lot of attention, most attacks are carried out by criminals simply looking to make money as easily as possible. Read more: