Five Features Of The Changing Threat Landscape
Uploaded on 2019-09-02 in TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, FREE TO VIEW
Organisations and critical infrastructure are likely experience far more-destructive cyber-attacks, including physical damage perpetrated by highly funded rogue nation states and cyber-criminals looking to disrupt business operations, make money or spy on targets, according to a new report from AccentureCybercrime campaigns and high-profile advanced persistent threat groups are shifting how they target victims and focusing more on intricate relationships with “secure syndicate” partnerships to disguise activity, according to Accenture's 2019 Cyber Threatscape Report.
The Accenture Security iDefense Threat Intelligence Services team has observed a distinct and dangerous shift in threat actor TTPs during the past 12 months. Threat actors are pivoting their operations strategically, operationally and tactically, and in doing so they are testing the resilience of organisations who are doing their best to keep up.
The report has discovered five factors that are influencing the cyber threat landscape:
1. Compromising geopolitics:
New threats emerge from disinformation and technology evolution Global businesses may find themselves in the crosshairs as geopolitical tensions persist. As cyber-threat actors take advantage of high-profile global events and seek to influence mass opinion, these actors will not only sustain current levels of activity but also to take advantage of new capabilities as new technologies enable more-sophisticated threat TTPs.
2. Cybercriminals adapt, hustle, diversify and are looking more like states.
Despite high-profile law enforcement actions against criminal communities and syndicates in 2018, the ability of threat actors to remain operational highlights the significant increase in the maturity and resilience of criminal networks in 2019. Analysis indicates conventional cybercrime and financially-motivated, targeted attacks will continue to pose a significant threat for individual Internet users and businesses.
However, criminal operations will likely continue to shift their tactics to reduce risks of detection and disruptions. They could also attempt to maximise the return on effort in several ways such as: shifting away from partnerships to operating within close-knit syndicates; taking advantage of familiarity with the local environment; increasing the precision of targeting by using legitimate documents to identify likely victims before delivering malware; or selling and buying direct access to networks for ransomware delivery rather than carrying out advanced intrusions.
3. Hybrid motives pose new dangers in ransomware defense and response.
The ransomware threat will be exacerbated further by the sale of access to corporate networks, through which an attacker can deploy ransomware on a corporate-wide scale, and the potential of ransomware with self-propagating abilities (such as WannaCry) to reemerge could pose a significant threat to businesses, particularly those with time-critical operations.
While the motives behind such an attack may appear to be financial, targeted ransomware attacks may at times serve hybrid motives, whether financial, ideological, or political. Regardless of motive, while the ransomware threat remains, organisations must ensure they take adequate measures to prepare, prevent, detect, respond, and contain a corporation-wide ransomware attack.
4. Improved ecosystem hygiene is pushing threats to the supply chain, turning friends into frenemies.
The global interconnectedness of business, the wider adoption of traditional industry Cyberthreat countermeasures and improvements to basic cybersecurity hygiene appear to be pushing Cyberthreat actors to seek new avenues to compromise organisations, such as targeting their supply chains, including those for software, hardware and the cloud.
5. Life after meltdown:
Vulnerabilities in compute cloud infrastructure demand costly solutions. The discovery of multiple side-channel vulnerabilities in modern CPUs over the last two years could pose a high risk to organisations running their compute infrastructure in the public cloud. Adversaries can use this class of side-channel vulnerabilities to read sensitive data from other hosts on the same physical server. Mitigations are available for most platforms, cloud deployments, and software.
However, most of the remedies come at a cost of reduced performance, leading to a potential increase of compute costs for enterprises. The more organisations invest in securing their networks and training their staff on how to safely navigate the digital workplace, the harder and more expensive it becomes for threat actors to disrupt or breach networks.
You Might Also Read:
