| | MAY 20218IN FOCUSThe Disruptive Shift of Cyber ThreatsBY CEO INSIGHTS TEAMMichael Jospeh, Director System Engineering, India & SAARC, Fortinet, quoted, "2020 witnessed a dramatic cyber threat landscape from beginning to end. Although the pandemic played a central role, as the year progressed cyber adversaries evolved attacks with increasingly disruptive outcomes. They maximized the expanded digital attack surface beyond the core network, to target remote work or learning, and the digital supply chain. Cybersecurity risk has never been greater as everything is interconnected in a larger digital environment. Integrated and AI-driven platform approaches, powered by actionable threat intelligence, are vital to defend across all edges and to identify and remediate threats organizations face today in real time."2020 was indeed a year of learning for all of us. It surely had a learning for everyone, whether it's the common man or the highly experienced cyber leaders, the year taught all a lesson or two. Fortinet's latest semiannual FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report highlights that the threat intelligence from the second half of 2020 demonstrates an unprecedented cyber threat landscape where cyber adversaries maximized the constantly expanding attack surface to scale threat efforts around the world. Adversaries proved to be highly adaptable, creating waves of disruptive and sophisticated attacks. Attackers targeted the abundance of remote workers or learners outside the traditional network. They also showed renewed agility in attempts to target digital supply chains and even the core network.Some of the key highlights of the findings are onslaught of ransomware that continued to haunt the cyber experts; supplychain took the centre stage; adversaries targeted the online moves of the users while the home branch office remained a constant target; surprisingly, the cast of actors joined the global stage; and last but not the least, flattening the curve of vulnerability exploits.If we go deeper into each of them, we would know that the research showed a sevenfold increase in overall ransomware activity compared to 1H 2020, with multiple trends responsible for the increase in activity. The focus on big ransoms for big targets were set and the threat of disclosing stolen data if demands were not met combined together to create conditions for the massive growth in ransomware attacks.In addition, the varying degrees of prevalence, the most active of the ransomware strains tracked were Egregor, Ryuk, Conti, Thanos, Ragnar, WastedLocker, Phobos/EKING and BazarLoader. Five sectors were the most hit, which includes healthcare, professional service firms, consumer services companies, public sector organizations, and financial services firms. Hence organizations need to ensure data backups are timely, complete, and secure off-site. Zero-trust THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT CYBERSECURITY USER AWARENESS TRAINING SHOULD REMAIN A TOP PRIORITY AS CYBER HYGIENE IS NOT JUST THE DOMAIN IT AND SECURITY TEAMS
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