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Cybersecurity threat landscape

Scaling for threats in motion

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The threat landscape continues rapid evolution

Cyber attackers are producing new tricks. In our most recent report, we dive into the latest major threat trends:

  1. Trojans and droppers are being re-used

  2. Multi-staged attacks are becoming the norm

  3. Cryptomining leads to other cyber threats

  4. Pandemic topics open new attack routes

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Change told by the numbers

91%

of customers saw a domain linked to malware in 2020

2x

Cryptomining attack query volumes twice as large as next greatest attack type

40%

Phishing threats jumped 40% between 2019 and 2020, driven partly by pandemic themes

Trend #1: Repurposing trojans and droppers for new forms of malware delivery

Attackers are using and re-using malware that has been proven to deliver results. They’re doing this as part of a larger, orchestrated attack chain. Two major reasons for their success are:

  • Their ability to deploy follow-up malware that does further damage down the cyber attack chain
  • Their highly distributed command-and-control (C2) infrastructure makes take-down harder
From the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape Report: The distribution of Emotet C2 loaders is shown by green circles on gray continents of this map of the globe.


Trend #2: Orchestrated, multi-staged, and evasive attacks are becoming the norm

Attackers are employing complex attacks that use new delivery mechanisms such as macros and other legitimate application functionality to:

  • Evade detection
  • Hide the theft of data
  • Coordinate through command and control servers


“Cybersecurity professionals need new tricks to sort the hidden bad actors . . . One tool that could reveal these hidden threats is the use of entropy.”

-Shyam S. Ramaswami
Security Researcher, Cisco

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Trend #3: Cryptomining opens the door to other cyber threats

Some think that cryptomining is not a big concern. But there are situations that pose more risk, such as cryptomining software that, when loaded, becomes the first step in a multi-staged attack on your infrastructure.


From the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape Report: This graph shows jumps in malicious query traffic by geographic region over several months. North America has exponentially more malicious traffic than EMEA, APJC or LATAM.

Trend #4: Attackers using pandemic-related themes to pick the cyber locks

The pandemic has a lot of people on edge. Bad actors are taking advantage of our interest in the topic and setting up numerous sites to phish for credentials and drop malware.

Key takeaways

The world is changing, threats are changing, and you should be changing too.

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SASE solutions

Implement scalable first-line-of-defense tools, like cloud security technologies and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions

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Interactive threat intelligence

Leverage timely, accurate threat intelligence that allows for data to be incorporated into security monitoring.

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Automated prevention

Embrace automated event sequencing and machine learning to prevent attacks

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