2020 cybersecurity predictions
Andrew James
SHIELD: We only provide Cybersecurity, So Your IT Provider Can Focus on Support and Maintenance. We Find, Detect, Report!
We’ve had a predictably unpredictable year for cybercrime in 2019, though many of the issues we were concerned about heading into the year turned out to be justified by increased activity or efforts to exploit, infect, collect, and blackmail users and their systems. So, what about 2020? Is it going to be different? We’ve collected six highly likely predictions for the next 12 months, based on what we’ve seen in the past and what we’re most afraid of in the future.
Ransomware attacks on organizations will continue at a more rapid pace, thanks to a diversification in attack vectors.
Over the last two years, malware developers have turned their focus to business targets over consumers, and ransomware is the threat of choice. While in the past, ransomware was typically delivered via exploit, 2019 saw a huge diversity in attack vectors dropping their favorite malware on organizations’ endpoints, from exploit kits to botnets to hacking tools and manual infection. We saw more vulnerabilities in 2017 and 2018 than in any year before, and 2019 was a close match in volume.
More vulnerabilities means more exploits, and we’re likely to see some of the 43,000 vulnerabilities discovered over the last two years show up in future EK offerings. We saw an example of this with BlueKeep, a software vulnerability that affects older versions of Microsoft Windows. It attacks an operating system’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which connects to another computer over a network connection to quickly spread.
We’ve seen so much Emotet and TrickBot in the last two years—often the precursors to ransomware payloads— we’ve starting saying their names in our sleep. The “triple threat” attack model has proven so effective, we expect even more Trojans and droppers and downloaders and botnets to join the party in 2020, offering affiliates a multitude of options for multi-stage attacks.
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Finally, the development and prevalence of malicious hacking tools designed to more effectively attack networks will surely attract ransomware authors and affiliates to first penetrate, then decimate business infrastructures in 2020. Bottom line, this ransomware problem isn’t going away. We are likely to see more non-affiliated cybercriminals using tricks developed by state-sponsored malware groups (APT), as we did with EternalBlue. And if we do, we’re in for a turbulent year of cybercrime.
Its not IF but when will your business experience a cyber attack? A secure IT network is a reliable and efficient network.
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