Cybercriminals are Shifting their Attention towards Low-Profile Attacks to Steal Money

Trend Micro, cyber security leader, said on 30 August, 2018, that the cybercriminals are shifting their attention from the ransomware attacks towards more covert approaches, with an aim to steal valuable computing resources and money globally including India.

As per the report "Midyear Security Roundup 2018", attempts of crypto-jacking - where cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin are stolen from the digital wallets by the hacker - are creating a huge impact as far as this year is concerned.

In first half of the year 2018, Trend Micro recorded that there was 96% rise in the cryptocurrency mining detections as compared to the detections of the entire year of 2017. Moreover, an enormous 956% increase in cryptocurrency mining detections was found in first half of the year 2018 when compared with first half of the year 2017.

The above information indicates that cybercriminals have now shifted their interest from ransomware (which provides a quick return) to a much slower, behind-the-scenes approach to steal the computing power for mining the digital currencies.

Trend Micro Vice President of India and South East Asia, Nilesh Jain, said that in the past few years, there has been an emergence of many cyber security breaches, and the databases of Indian enterprises, banking institutions, and the government email servers have been attacked and fallen prey to these breaches many a times.

He further added that, "we have also seen few Public Cloud providers getting compromised this year. Next year, the customers who don't take adequate measures to their applications or data which are hosted in Public Cloud, might even get compromised".

The first half of year 2018 also witnessed a shift towards unusual types of malware, such as small file malware, fileless malware and macro malware.

In first half of the year 2018, Trend Micro recorded that there was 250% rise in detections of "TinyPOS" small file malware when compared with second half of the year 2017.

Global Threat Communications Director for Trend Micro, Jon Clay, said that "the recent change in the threat landscape mirrors what we've seen for years that cybercriminals will constantly shift their tools, tactics and procedures (TTPs) to improve their infection rates".

» SPAMfighter News - 9/11/2018