Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Currently, ransomware is the most prominent cyber threat to businesses and individuals. Ransomware attacks are growing more prevalent as cybercriminals find new ways to profit from them. According to CyberEdge’s 2021 Cyberthreat Defense Report, 62% of organizations were victimized by ransomware in 2019—up from 56% in 2018 and 55% in 2017. This rise is arguably fueled by the dramatic increase in ransomware payments.

At the beginning of 2021, Emotet was considered to be the world’s most dangerous malware by Europol. The threat was first discovered in 2014 when it was acting as a banking trojan. Over the years, the malware evolved into one of the most relevant botnets in the threat landscape, often used to deliver other threats, such as Trickbot and Ryuk ransomware. Netskope detected Emotet during Oct 2020, using PowerShell and WMI to download and execute its payload.

It is prediction time once again, and we’ve polled some of our esteemed experts here at Netskope to see what’s piquing their interest with 2022 on the horizon. Much like our predictions last year, we’ve broken the list out into some longer shots and some pretty safe bets. Here’s what we think is in store for 2022.

A few months ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a draft framework for ransomware risk management. But it's not the only publication on such threats, as the institute has also produced a guide recently on how MSPs should protect data from ransomware and other data loss events.

The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling to report vulnerable and malicious packages to repository maintainers. Earlier this year we disclosed several malicious packages targeting developers’ private data that were downloaded approximately 30K times.

Malware is continuously mutating, targeting new services and platforms. The Sysdig Security Research team has identified the famous Muhstik Botnet with new behavior, attacking a Kubernetes Pod with the plan to control the Pod and mine cryptocurrency. A WordPress Kubernetes Pod was compromised by the Muhstik worm and added to the botnet. On the Pod has been deployed and executed various types of crypto miners, like xmra64andxmrig64.

When organizations are attacked by ransomware, only a little more than half are able to recover their data using a backup. This begs the question, “What about the rest? Why might they be unable to recover?” One reason may be that their backup data has been compromised. Backups are a hot target for hackers. If they can get to an organization’s backup data, they have far more leverage.

We decided to try to run a well-known Remote Access Trojan (RAT) called Remcos used by FIN7. This tool has been around for some time and has a reputation for being stealthy and effective in controlling compromised hosts. Sold as a remote computer monitoring tool, this tool has plenty of features that can allow an operator behind the control to do multiple operations against a compromised system.