Next Targets for Cybercriminals: the Short Term (Part 1)

Knowing what cybercriminals are targeting today is easy. Their attacks are loud, impactful, and have the elegance of a herd of bulls crashing through a china shop. The tougher challenge is figuring out where they will take aim tomorrow. Knowing where cyber threats will arise gives us the necessary insights to remain one step ahead of their mayhem.

In the short term

The current focus is on lucrative e-commerce: online shopping, email ransomware, phishing for credentials, and infection by holiday-lurking malware. It is also a time for dark markets to thrive, selling unmentionables to those looking for illegal items for the holiday celebrations.

We must all expect malware-ridden holiday sale emails and websites. Look for the fake shipping invoice or an urgent message from some merchant. All bogus. Shady e-commerce sites, advertising insane deals as bait, aim to harvest credit card accounts, emails, and maybe convince you to install some “helpful” software. Phishing increases this time of year: Look for a new wave of ransomware to hold family pictures, personal files, and entire systems for extortion. Identity theft will add to the rise of new credit card applications for unauthorized shopping. In the next couple of months, all of these financially motivated threats will increase, so now is a time to be on your guard.

Businesses beware

Businesses must worry about the increased amount of e-commerce fraud, ransomware that extorts money to unlock important files, and the ever-present risk of data breaches. Health care, retail, and financial sectors will be targeted the most, but all businesses are in jeopardy. Social media will be targeted as a springboard to reach more potential victims and influence them to download or visit sites containing malware. Some large companies that rely heavily on web traffic will suffer distributed denial of service (DDoS) extortion attempts. “Pay or be unavailable to your customers” is the threat. As always, cash is king and credit is queen. More ATM attacks are in our future. Europe will be the hotbed, given its machine density and proximity to current thieving bands who are becoming more proficient at these attacks. The United States will suffer from more credit card and debit card fraud, some in stores, but more shifting toward online sites as the chip-on-card initiative forces thieves to adapt.

Exploiting IoT devices

Hacking home devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) is easy for botnet herders looking to amass an army to conduct DDoS attacks. But there is little money in merely attacking. Some will adjust to provide “protection” extortion schemes. Others will move into using those simple devices to create social media accounts that can “follow” or “like” en masse for a fee. Early signs are already present as buying followers/likes is lucrative business in the ego markets of social media.

Looking down the road a bit, we will actually see fewer random attacks against IoT devices. Two factors will be at play. First, IoT device manufacturers and consumers will shift to close today’s basic weakness: the use of default passwords. The second change will occur when professional hackers, likely organized criminals and nation-states, take over the market with more professional hacking capabilities. They tend to not play nice with others. Upon compromising an IoT device, they will immediately close the vulnerability so they are not displaced by another hacker. This ensures they will keep control of their victims.

We will see more creative ways for attackers to monetize this resource by coupling with ransomware, DDoS attacks, data leakage, creation of mass accounts to facilitate fraud, and perhaps even creating specialty routing networks to obfuscate traffic. The result will be more devices exploited, but in a more organized manner, until such time as the IoT industry becomes much more secure overall.

In a subsequent post, I will look into the long-term targets of cybercriminals. There are many opportunities that could reap big payouts. They are a greedy lot and I expect them to make bold moves.

Interested in more? Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist) and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity

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