Cyber Attack

A cyber attack is an assault launched by cybercriminals using one or more computers against a single or multiple computers or networks. A cyber attack can maliciously disable computers, steal data, or use a breached computer as a launch point for other attacks. Cybercriminals use a variety of methods to launch a cyber attack, including malware, phishing, ransomware, denial of service, among other methods.

Cyberattack Trends

Use of AI :

One of the defining features of 2023 was the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in cyber security. ChatGPT had a public launch in the final few months of 2023 and was seen as groundbreaking and unique. Within a few months, there were hundreds or thousands of new tools and projects applying generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to a variety of different tasks.

In the cybersecurity space, generative AI has numerous potential applications. These tools have already been applied to dramatically increase the quality of social engineering attacks and develop novel malware, including infostealers, keyloggers, and ransomware.

While companies such as OpenAI have attempted to build defenses into their tools, they have met with limited success. Research has demonstrated that these restrictions can be easily bypassed, allowing cybercriminals to leverage these tools to increase the scale and sophistication of their attacks.

Hacktivism :

Hacktivists perform cyberattacks with political motivations. While groups such as Anonymous have performed such attacks for years, 2022 and the first half of 2023 have seen a dramatic uptick in state-affiliated hacktivist attacks.

These attacks commonly employ distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt operations at organizations located in a particular nation-state. For example, the Russian-affiliated Killnet has targeted Western healthcare organizations, while the pro-Islamic Anonymous Sudan has attacked Scandinavian Airlines, US healthcare organizations, and Microsoft.

Key measures to prevent cyber attacks:

●Maintain security hygiene

●Choose prevention over detection

●Cover all attack vectors

●Implement the most advanced technologies