Cybercrime is everywhere – and staying on top of today’s evolving threats has never been more important for IT and security leaders. In particular, understanding the dark web is essential.
To that end, we pulled together 5 takeaways from HP Wolf’s security report – The Evolution of Cybercrime: Why the Dark Web is Supercharging the Threat Landscape and How to Fight Back – to keep you up to date on the dark web.
Access and control are the name of the game. Every intrusion requires a point of entry into a victim’s network, making access and control the Holy Grail of cybercrime. Social engineering is among the most favoured ways into a system.
- Finding #1 – In the first quarter of 2022, 69% of malware isolated by HP Wolf Security had been sent via email – in messages disguised as innocent-looking business documents.
- Finding #2 – Another way in is via stolen usernames and passwords from the dark web itself: the HP research found the average cost of Remote Desktop Protocol credentials sold on the dark web is $5. One site that collects information lost in corporate data breaches has no less than 11 billion credentials.
In the future, destructive data denial attacks will become even more damaging.
- Finding #3 – As organisations increasingly embrace both hybrid work and digital transformation, attackers will likely take advantage of the ever-widening attack surface. We can expect to see extortion attacks using the threat of data destruction against sectors that depend on IoT devices and data in time-sensitive and critical ways.
- Finding #4 – We are seeing a resurgence in destructive attacks on critical infrastructure, such as the wiper attacks in late 2021 and 2022, following in the footsteps of Shamoon (2012) and Michelangelo (1991), with malware that wipes data and disables systems without demanding a ransom.
- Finding #5 – In the future, we are likely to see attackers using AI and machine learning techniques to enable targeted spear-phishing attacks at scale. Attackers could deploy offensive tools that utilise AI capabilities to tailor phishing emails to key individuals at an organisation and speed up their post-exploitation activities after gaining an initial foothold into a network.
Click here to read the full The Evolution of Cybercrime report.
To learn more about HP Wolf Security, click here.
HP has several exciting events coming up this year – click on each to learn more.
- The Official CIO Summit UK presents the best opportunity to hear how your peers are tacking the biggest challenges in the UK IT industry. (This event takes place in September).
- The CSO Security Summit, scheduled for November, is the best place to hear what novel approaches and innovative technologies your security peers are taking to enhance and futureproof their security strategies.
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Source: News