Exploit Trends Demonstrate the Endpoint Remains a Target as Work-From-Anywhere Continues
Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, recently announced the latest semiannual FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report. For a detailed view of the report, as well as some important takeaways, read the blog. Highlights of the 1H 2022 report follow:
• The ransomware threat continues to adapt with more variants enabled by Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS).
• Work-from-anywhere (WFA) endpoints remain targets for cyber adversaries to gain access to corporate networks. Operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) environments are both attractive targets as cyber adversaries search for opportunities in the growing attack surface and IT/OT convergence.
• Destructive threat trends continue to evolve, as evidenced by the spread of wiper malware as part of adversary toolkits.
• Cyber adversaries are embracing more reconnaissance and defense evasion techniques to increase precision and destructive weaponization across the cyber-attack chain.
Commenting on this report, Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC & Southeast Asia at Fortinet said; “Cyber adversaries are advancing their playbooks to thwart defense and scale their criminal affiliate networks. They are using aggressive execution strategies such as extortion or wiping data as well as focusing on reconnaissance tactics pre-attack to ensure better return on threat investment. To combat advanced and sophisticated attacks, organizations need integrated security solutions that can ingest real-time threat intelligence, detect threat patterns, and correlate massive amounts of data to detect anomalies and automatically initiate a coordinated response across hybrid networks.”
Ransomware Variant Growth Shows Evolution of Crime Ecosystems: Ransomware remains a top threat and cyber adversaries continue to invest significant resources into new attack techniques. In the past six months, FortiGuard Labs has seen a total of 10,666 ransomware variants, compared to just 5,400 in the previous six-month period. That is nearly 100% growth in ransomware variants in half a year. RaaS, with its popularity on the dark web, continues to fuel an industry of criminals forcing organizations to consider ransomware settlements. To protect against ransomware, organizations, regardless of industry or size, need a proactive approach. Real-time visibility, protection, and remediation coupled with zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) are critical.
Exploit Trends Show OT and the Endpoint Are Still Irresistible Targets: The digital convergence of IT and OT and the endpoints enabling WFA remain key vectors of attack as adversaries continue to target the growing attack surface. Many exploits of vulnerabilities at the endpoint involve unauthorized users gaining access to a system with a goal of lateral movement to get deeper into corporate networks. For example, a spoofing vulnerability placed high in volume, as well as a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. Also, analyzing endpoint vulnerabilities by volume and detections reveals the relentless path of cyber adversaries attempting to gain access by maximizing both old and new vulnerabilities. In addition, services such as a digital risk protection service (DRPS) can be used to do external surface threat assessments, find and remediate security issues, and help gain contextual insights on current and imminent threats.
Destructive Threat Trends Continue With Wipers Widening: Wiper malware trends reveal a disturbing evolution of more destructive and sophisticated attack techniques continuing with malicious software that destroys data by wiping it clean. The war in Ukraine fueled a substantial increase in disk wiping malware among threat actors primarily targeting critical infrastructure. FortiGuard Labs identified at least seven major new wiper variants in the first six months of 2022 that were used in various campaigns against government, military, and private organizations.
Defense Evasion Remains Top Attack Tactic Globally: Examining adversarial strategies reveals takeaways about how attack techniques and tactics are evolving. FortiGuard Labs analyzed the functionality of detected malware to track the most prevalent approaches over the last six months. Among the top eight tactics and techniques focused on the endpoint, defense evasion was the most employed tactic by malware developers. They are often using system binary proxy execution to do so. Hiding malicious intentions is one of the most important things for adversaries. Therefore, they are attempting to evade defenses by masking them and attempting to hide commands using a legitimate certificate to execute a trusted process and carry out malicious intent.
AI-powered Security Across the Extended Attack Surface
When organizations gain a deeper understanding of the goals and tactics used by adversaries through actionable threat intelligence, they can better align defenses to adapt and react to quickly changing attack techniques proactively. Threat insights are critical to help prioritize patching strategies to better secure environments. Cybersecurity awareness and training are also important as the threat landscape changes to keep employees and security teams up-to-date. Organizations need security operations that can function at machine speed to keep up with the volume, sophistication, and rate of today’s cyber threats. AI and ML-powered prevention, detection, and response strategies based on a cybersecurity mesh architecture allow for much tighter integration, increased automation, as well as a more rapid, coordinated, and effective response to threats across the extended network.
