Cyber attacks and cyber espionage is expected to become mainstream in 2015, as an inexpensive, but effective tool to gather intelligence, McAfee Labs predicts for the next year. The tool will be mostly used by “small nation states and terrorist groups”, the company’s 2015 predictions expect.
According to the document titled “McAfee Labs 2015 Threats Predictions” published just a few hours ago, terror groups and smaller states will launch “crippling” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and malware to cripple their adversaries computers and destroy their networks. At the same time long term cyber espionage players are expected to implement better stealth methods to remain out of sight, hiding longer in their targets’ computer systems.
Of particular note, McAfee Labs now sees sophisticated Eastern European cybercriminals shifting from quick, direct attacks on financial-institution customer credentials (leading to financial theft) to a more sophisticated advanced persistent threat (APT) approach in which they collect intelligence that they can either sell or use at a later date. In this way, criminals are beginning to look and act more like sophisticated nation-state cyber espionage actors, who watch and wait to gather intelligence
With the growth of the “Internet of Things” the number of attacks targeting interconnected objects is also expected to grow. Today we have a huge variety of devices connected to a network – appliances, cars, and even light bulbs, but there are important business uses for these connections as well, like in farming, health care or manufacturing. These “things” are not usually built with security as a basic principle, making them less resistant to attacks. The most worrying aspect of this vulnerability concerns healthcare – according to the report, medical information and health credentials are up to 20 times more valuable to attackers as credit card data. McAfee Labs expects a major attack on IoT devices to happen in 2015, directly linked to vulnerabilities in these devices.
The report expects to see more sophisticated ransomware attacks in 2015, with their targets being mostly mobile devices. These attacks will evolve to evade security software, targeting endpoints that subscribe to cloud services. The company also expects mobile devices to get more and more attention from attackers, as they expand the attack surface and “little is done to stop app store abuse”.
To read the complete report click here.