Ransomware attackers today have the technical skill and tools to analyze a target’s defenses and like a band of guerilla operatives attacking a more power adversary, the attackers avoid the teeth of the defense and hit their victim at its weakest point. All while layering in new tactics to force their victims to pay a ransom. To be prepared for this threat, an organization must have a plan in place to deal with the myriad of new tricks ransomware attackers have developed over the last few years.

While many organizations are patching the two recent Apache Log4j vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046), attackers have been racing to exploit them to deliver malware, such as botnets, backdoors, and cryptominers. Among the threats delivered using Log4Shell exploits, a new ransomware family was found by Bitdefender: Khonsari.

In September 2021, Tripwire released its annual report to examine the actions taken by the U.S. federal government to improve cybersecurity. The report also looks at non-government organizations so that we may catch a glimpse of the differing views and approaches of each, which makes for interesting (and revealing) insights.

CrowdStrike Falcon Pro™ has won another Approved Business Security Product award from AV-Comparatives, the second in 2021, scoring the highest 99.9% protection rate in the AV-Comparatives Real-World Protection Test. AV-Comparatives is a leading independent third-party testing organization that tests the efficacy of endpoint security solutions to offer insight into how endpoint security solutions detect and protect against real-world threats.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021, the global average cost of a data breach is estimated to be $4.24 million. Cyberattacks cost organizations time and money, not only in the form of data loss but also through irreversible damage to their reputations, leading to the loss of customers. After security breaches, customer loyalty is almost impossible to regain.

This is part 3 of Trustwave’s 2022 Cybersecurity Predictions blog series brought to you by our APAC team. In 2021, the cybersecurity industry was truly tested. Most notably, we uncovered the deeper fallout from the SolarWinds attacks, combatted the proliferation of advanced ransomware gangs and a surge in vulnerability exploitation, and saw fragile supply chain and critical infrastructure more targeted by attackers than ever.

COVID-19 made moving agency employees and services off-premises essential. This move, however, has also sparked one of the biggest waves of cybercrime the internet has ever seen. Ransomware attacks have been particularly effective against government agencies and critical infrastructure.

In 2020, I published an AT&T blog called “Top Cybersecurity Trends & Predictions for 2020’”. In the article I had forecasted that cybersecurity would become even more of a strategic priority for companies as the cost, sophistication, and lethality of breaches would continue to rise.

The Sysdig Threat Research Team has detected an attack that can be attributed to the TeamTNT. The initial target was a Kubernetes pod exposed outside the network. Once access was gained, the malware attempted to steal AWS credentials using the EC2 instance metadata. TeamTNT is a threat actor that conducts large-scale attacks against virtual and cloud solutions, like Kubernetes and Docker.

Known to be one of the most useful popular and dangerous threats, Emotet, firstly seen in 2014, is a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), that used to operate as a banking trojan targeting banks in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since 2017, Emotet has done a shift into a loader and took parts in campaigns, setting up for Trickbot delivery, deployment of ransomware such as Conti and Ryuk, and other malwares such as QuakBot, Azorult, SilentNight and more.