Cybercriminals are getting better and more sophisticated in their use of malware and using newly announced zero-day vulnerabilities to attack at speed and scale, according to the cyber product company Fortinet in its latest quarterly Global Threat Landscape Report.
The impact of destructive malware remains high, particularly as criminals combine it with designer attacks. For these types of more targeted attacks, criminals conduct significant reconnaissance on an organisation before launching an attack, which helps them to increase success rates. Afterwards, once they permeate the network, attackers move laterally across the network before triggering the most destructive part of their planned attack.
Ransomware continues to evolve, leveraging new delivery channels such as social engineering, and new techniques such as multi-stage attacks to evade detection and infect systems.
Phil Quade, chief information security officer, Fortinet, says: “We face a troubling convergence of trends across the cybersecurity landscape. Malicious cyber actors are demonstrating their efficiency and agility by exploiting the expanding digital attack surface, taking advantage of newly announced zero-day threats, and maximizing the accessibility of malware for bad. In addition, IT and OT teams often don’t have the resources necessary to keep systems appropriately hardened or protected. Luckily, implementing a security fabric which prioritizes —speed, integration, advanced analytics, and risk-based decision making— can enable comprehensive protection at machine speed and scale.”
Cryptojacking was quite prevalent in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Cryptomining malware is also showing diversity for such a relatively new threat, the cyber firm says. Cybercriminals are creating stealthier file-less malware to inject infected code into browsers with less detection. Miners are targeting multiple operating systems as well as cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Monero. They are also adopting delivery and propagation techniques from other threats based on what was successful or unsuccessful to improve success rates.
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