With 2022 having just ended, let's take a look back at the year in ransomware. With the average cost of an attack ranging from $570,00 to $812,360 for just the ransom, according to Cloudally, it should be no surprise that it continued to be one of the most prominent attacks utilized by malicious groups. We'll be doing a quick overview of a few of the most active groups within the space over the past year, and any developments that those groups have made in the past 12 months.

After Microsoft announced this year that macros from the Internet will be blocked by default in Office, many threat actors have switched to different file types such as Windows Shortcut (LNK), ISO or ZIP files, to distribute their malware. Nevertheless, Office documents are still actively leveraged in many campaigns and pose a large risk to organizations, especially with threat actors continuously finding new ways to avoid detection.

In predicting what will transpire in cybersecurity in 2023, the best method is to look at past experience. As with any security and criminal activity, threat actors tend to build upon what they have done in the past, adding new twists to keep their tactics fresh and effective. So, taking this into consideration, it is no surprise that Trustwave's security experts see much of the same type of attacks that plagued 2022 continuing.

In predicting what will transpire in cybersecurity in 2023, the best method is to look at past experience. As with any security and criminal activity, threat actors tend to build upon what they have done in the past, adding new twists to keep their tactics fresh and effective. So, taking this into consideration, it is no surprise that Trustwave's security experts see much of the same type of attacks that plagued 2022 continuing.

ChatGPT has been available to the public since November 30, 2022. Since then, it has made headlines – from being temporarily banned from Stack Overflow because, “while the answers ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good, and the answers are very easy to produce,” .

Cybercriminals who use Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are switching up their tactics, with some groups now targeting actual merchandise instead of money in their phishing attacks. Trustwave’s email security solution MailMarshal is aware of and investigating this new methodology. MailMarshal is capable of defending an organization against BEC attacks. This Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA OCI), and the U.S.

Trustwave SpiderLabs is among the most well-respected teams in the cybersecurity industry, having gained a reputation for conducting cutting-edge research, plying the foggy corners of the darkweb for information, and detecting and hunting down threats. What is less well known is how Trustwave's SpiderLabs' various teams' function and then pull together to create the formidable force that is the backbone of all Trustwave's offerings.

On Tuesday, December 13, a joint announcement from the United States NSA and Citrix announced a zero-day vulnerability in Citrix ADC. The vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) is a critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) issue currently rated as CVSS 9.8. Patches are already available from Citrix. The NSA attributes the zero-day to APT5, a Chinese hacking collective. There is currently no guidance for how widespread the campaign has been or how long it's been ongoing.

Meta has two of the largest social media platforms today, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms became the modern gateway for people not just to socialize and eavesdrop on the lives of famous personalities, but more importantly, to stay connected with their friends and loved ones. The sites also became effective channels for organizations to advertise and disseminate information.

An organization's database contains intellectual property, information on clients, product development, personal information on its workers, and in many cases, critical information on consumers. Therefore, it not only makes sense to fully understand how an attacker can threaten a database, but how to best defend against such an attack. So, what are those dangers? In no particular order, the most significant threats facing databases today are system, privilege, and credential threats.