The Threat Landscape 2022: Cybercriminals are well organized and financed
Information is the new gold. As information assets are becoming more and more business-critical, the more damage threats and risks will cause. The probability also increases for the simple reason that there’s a higher number of ‘threat actors’ and threats out there today.
Today’s threat landscape is complex, and cybercriminals are well organized and financed. It has never been as relevant as it is today to ensure you have established a systematic approach to identify, protect, detect and recover from breaches or other abuse from external - or internal – threat actors i.e. establishing an Information Security Program to ensure that you have identified your most important assets and you understand how you can protect them.
Various threats identified
Ransomware has been a fast-growing problem for several years and is still growing. It’s a threat to all kinds of organizations. Cybercriminals exploits vulnerabilities in a non-discriminate way and effort are made to target more valuable organizations.
The most common way to enter an organization's IT systems and plant malicious code i.e. ransomware is through various kinds of methods i.e. phishing, smishing, etc. The intention is to trick users at all levels to open a malicious document (ex. an email attachment) or clicking a link to a malicious website. It could also be inserted through a 'brute-force' attack or a cracked/leaked password to a user account.
Another buzzword is ‘supply chain’-attacks which is another way for cybercriminals to enter their target organizations' IT systems. By attacking or planting malicious software on suppliers' IT systems they can access the targeted organization's information or IT systems.
Even if new threats evolve and tend to steal the spotlight, all old ones still exist and impose a real threat to any organization. For example, the Swedish ‘Valmyndigheten’ was a target for three ‘Denial of Service' attacks (DOS attacks) during the last Swedish Government election (September 2022).
The number of different threats and threat actors is large and growing. There is analytics that estimates that the combined global organized cyber-criminal turnover will be bigger than the illegal drug business in 2022. Of course, there is no way to verify that assumption, but it indicates that cyber security should be taken seriously and requires action to avoid serious business interruption.
So, what is there to do? Can we battle this complex and infinite war of cyber criminals? We can, and we should! Number one on the list is to implement a systematic approach - if not already done. This means a pragmatic risk-based approach with a focus on the cost and benefits of implementing cyber security enhancements in organizations (people), processes, and tools - usually called an ISMS (Information Security Management System). An ISMS is a set of governing policies and rules for securing systems and information and achieving or maintaining the desired risk level. The most widely spread ISMS is based on the ISO 27001 standard.
