Cyber

2020 threat landscape

by Mark Rowe

Thus far, the dominant themes of the 2020 threat landscape have been the cybercriminal’s quick adaptation to exploit the pandemic and the considerable impact of cyber-attacks have had, according to the cyber product firm McAfee.

Raj Samani, McAfee fellow and chief scientist, pictured, said: “What began as a trickle of phishing campaigns and the occasional malicious app quickly turned into a deluge of malicious URLs and capable threat actors leveraging the world’s thirst for more information on COVID-19 as an entry mechanism into systems across the globe.”

Each quarter, the firm assesses the cyber threat landscape based threat data gathered by the McAfee Global Threat Intelligence cloud from over a billion sensors. The company’s researchers found it is typical of COVID-19 campaigns to use pandemic-related subjects including testing, treatments, cures, and remote work topics to lure targets into clicking on a malicious link, download a file, or view a PDF. McAfee Advanced Programs Group (APG) has published a COVID-19 Threat Dashboard.

Patrick Flynn, head of McAfee APG said: “Cybersecurity cannot be solved by cookie-cutter approaches, each organisation is unique and has specific intelligence requirements and objectives.

“The McAfee COVID-19 Threat Dashboard utilises data to create true analysed intelligence, which allows users to understand the total threat environment, informing them of potential threats before they are weaponised.”

Over the first quarter of 2020, McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) observed malicious actors focus on sectors where availability and integrity are fundamental, for example manufacturing, law and construction firms.

Christiaan Beek, senior principal engineer and lead scientist said: “No longer can we call these attacks just ransomware incidents. When actors have access to the network and steal the data prior to encrypting it, threatening to leak if you don’t pay, that is a data breach.

“Using either weakly protected Remote Desktop Protocol or stolen credentials from the underground, we have observed malicious actors moving at lightspeed to learn the network of their victims and effectively steal and then encrypt their data.”

New ransomware declined 12pc in the first quarter of the year; total ransomware increased 32pc over the past four quarters. New malware samples slowed by 35pc; total malware increased 27pc over the past four quarters. New Mac OS malware samples increased by 51pc. New mobile malware increased by 71pc, with total malware growing nearly 12pc over the past four quarters.

McAfee Labs counted 458 publicly disclosed security incidents, an increase of 41pc from the final quarter of 2019. Half of all publicly disclosed security incidents took place in North America, followed by 9pc in Europe. Nearly 47pc of all publicly disclosed security incidents took place in the United States. Overall, malware led disclosed attack vectors, followed by account hijacking and targeted attacks.

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