Report: No firm is immune to the evolving attack trends of cyber criminals

Findings from Fortinet’s latest Global Threat Landscape Report show that cyber criminals are becoming smarter and learning how to integrate exploits in new ways.

The security firm discovered that almost no firm is immune from the evolving attack trends of cyber criminals as it found out that 96 percent of organizations experience at least one severe exploit.

Fortinet’s report also revealed that as mining for cryptocurrency continues, the attack method has also evolved.

Attackers use compromised devices to mine cryptocurrency without the knowledge or consent of affected users.

Cyber criminals have also added IoT (Internet of Things) devices, including media devices in the home to their arsenal. Fortinet explained that connected devices are attractive targets because of their rich source of computational horsepower, which can be used for malicious purposes.

Attackers are now loading malware that continually mines IoT devices because they are always on and connected to the Internet. The interfaces for these devices are also being exploited as modified web browsers to expand the vulnerabilities and exploit vectors on them.

Phil Quade, Chief Information Security Officer at Fortinet, provided further insight into how cyber criminals are evolving.

“Cyber adversaries are relentless. Increasingly, they are automating their toolsets and creating variations of known exploits. Of late, they are also more precise in their targeting, relying less on blanket attempts to find exploitable victims,” he said.

“Urgently, organizations must pivot their security strategy to address these tactics. Organizations should leverage automated and integrated defenses to address the problems of speed and scale, utilize high-performance behavior-based detection, and rely on AI-informed threat intelligence insights to focus their efforts on patching vulnerabilities that matter,” he added. /ee