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.

Finland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-FI) has issued a warning about malicious SMS messages that have been spammed out to mobile users, directing iPhone owners to phishing sites and Android users to download malware. The messages are written in Finnish but without the customary accented characters. In some instances, the messages pose as a notification that the user has received a voicemail message, or a communication from their mobile network provider.

This is part 2 of Trustwave’s 2022 Cybersecurity Predictions blog series. 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.