Threat actors continue to develop new tool sets and techniques, targeting corporate assets stored on cloud infrastructure, individuals’ mobile devices, trusted third-party supplier applications and even popular mail platforms:
Mobile banking: With over 50% increase in attacks when compared to 2018, banking malware has evolved to become a very common mobile threat. Today, banking malware is capable of stealing payment data, credentials and funds from victims’ bank accounts, and new versions of these malware are ready for massive distribution by anyone that’s willing to pay.
Software supply chain attacks: Threat actors are extending their attack vectors such as focusing on the supply chain. In software supply chain attacks, the threat actor typically instils a malicious code into legitimate software, by modifying and infecting one of the building blocks the software relies upon.
Email: Email scammers have started to employ various evasion techniques designed to bypass security solutions and anti-spam filters such as encoded emails, images of the message embedded in the email body, as well as complex underlying code which mixes plain text letters with HTML characters. Additional methods allowing scammers to remain under the radar of Anti-Spam filters and reaching targets’ inbox include social engineering techniques, as well as varying and personalizing email content.
Cloud: The growing popularity of public cloud environments has led to an increase in cyber-attacks targeting enormous resources and sensitive data residing within these platforms. The lack of security practices such as misconfiguration and poor management of the cloud resources, remains the most prominent threat to the cloud ecosystem in 2019, subjecting cloud assets to a wide array of attacks.
“Be it cloud, mobile or email, no environment is immune to cyber attacks. In addition, threats such as targeted Ransomware attacks, DNS attacks and Cryptominers will continue to be relevant in 2019, and security experts need to stay attuned to the latest threats and attack methods to provide their organizations with the best level of protection,” said Maya Horowitz, Director, Threat Intelligence & Research, Products at Check Point.
