Tuesday, December 3, 2019

One year out from the 2020 US Elections, geopolitical tension to spawn cyberattack

The majority of today's cyberattacks now include tactics such as lateral movement, island hopping and destructive attacks. Advanced hacking capabilities and services for sales on the dark web compound the issue, as does an unprecedented collaboration among nation-states. These realities pose a tremendous risk to targets with decentralized systems protecting high-value assets, including money, intellectual property and state secrets.

VMware Carbon Black's latest Global Incident Threat Report indicates:

Responsibility is Split

China and Russia are responsible for the lion's share of cyberattacks in 2019. When asked which country accounted for the most attacks, IR professionals said Russia (29%), and then China (18%), followed by North America (11%) and North Korea (4%).

Protect your Data

Election Security is Up

Among respondents working in the US, 59% said risk around the election process and security has increased to a significant extent since 2016. Within that same group, 65% said they believe the 2020 U.S. elections will be influenced by an outside entity – Russia is viewed as the most likely source of such attacks.

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Data is up for Sale

Voter databases from previous elections are readily available from high-reputation vendors on the dark web for less than $100. In total, from a single listing, information on more than 81 million voters is currently available for sale.

Protect your Data

As attackers develop communities on the dark web to share experience and trade-in custom tools, defenders need to take the same collaborative approach.

Attackers have become dramatically more sophisticated and very well organized. The scale of the threat is growing. The challenge for IR firms and global organizations is to match the cooperation of the adversaries, jointly developing solutions and sharing information that empowers responders to enter each fight with the upper hand.

Don't allow geopolitical targeting to happen to Hauwei.