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2025-02-11 20:00:00 |
Cybercrime: A Multifaceted National Security Threat (lien direct) |
Executive Summary
Cybercrime makes up a majority of the malicious activity online and occupies the majority of defenders\' resources. In 2024, Mandiant Consulting responded to almost four times more intrusions conducted by financially motivated actors than state-backed intrusions. Despite this overwhelming volume, cybercrime receives much less attention from national security practitioners than the threat from state-backed groups. While the threat from state-backed hacking is rightly understood to be severe, it should not be evaluated in isolation from financially motivated intrusions.
A hospital disrupted by a state-backed group using a wiper and a hospital disrupted by a financially motivated group using ransomware have the same impact on patient care. Likewise, sensitive data stolen from an organization and posted on a data leak site can be exploited by an adversary in the same way data exfiltrated in an espionage operation can be. These examples are particularly salient today, as criminals increasingly target and leak data from hospitals. Healthcare\'s share of posts on data leak sites has doubled over the past three years, even as the number of data leak sites tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group has increased by nearly 50% year over year. The impact of these attacks mean that they must be taken seriously as a national security threat, no matter the motivation of the actors behind it.
Cybercrime also facilitates state-backed hacking by allowing states to purchase cyber capabilities, or co-opt criminals to conduct state-directed operations to steal data or engage in disruption. Russia has drawn on criminal capabilities to fuel the cyber support to their war in Ukraine. GRU-linked APT44 (aka Sandworm), a unit of Russian military intelligence, has employed malware available from cybercrime communities to conduct espionage and disruptive operations in Ukraine and CIGAR (aka RomCom), a group that historically focused on cybercrime, has conducted espionage operations against the Ukrainian government since 2022. However, this is not limited to Russia. Iranian threat groups deploy ransomware to raise funds while simultaneously conducting espionage, and Chinese espionage groups often supplement their income with cybercrime. Most notably, North Korea uses state-backed groups to directly generate revenue for the regime. North Korea has heavily targeted cryptocurrencies, compromising exchanges and individual victims\' crypto wallets.
Despite the overlaps in effects and collaboration with states, tackling the root causes of cybercrime requires fundamentally different solutions. Cybercrime involves collaboration between disparate groups often across borders and without respect to sovereignty. Any solution requires international cooperation by both law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track, arrest, and prosecute these criminals. Individual takedowns can have important temporary effects, but the collaborative nature of cybercrime means that the disrupted group will be quickly replaced by others offering the same service. Achieving broader success will require collaboration between countries and public and private sectors on systemic solutions such as increasing education and resilience efforts.
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Ransomware
Malware
Tool
Vulnerability
Threat
Legislation
Medical
Cloud
Technical
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APT 41
APT 38
APT 29
APT 43
APT 44
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★★★
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2024-06-27 14:00:00 |
Le renouveau mondial du hacktivisme nécessite une vigilance accrue des défenseurs Global Revival of Hacktivism Requires Increased Vigilance from Defenders (lien direct) |
Written by: Daniel Kapellmann Zafra, Alden Wahlstrom, James Sadowski, Josh Palatucci, Davyn Baumann, Jose Nazario
Since early 2022, Mandiant has observed the revival and intensification of threat activity from actors leveraging hacktivist tactics and techniques. This comes decades after hacktivism first emerged as a form of online activism and several years since many defenders last considered hacktivism to be a serious threat. However, this new generation of hacktivism has grown to encompass a more complex and often impactful fusion of tactics different actors leverage for their specific objectives.
Today\'s hacktivists exhibit increased capabilities in both intrusion and information operations demonstrated by a range of activities such as executing massive disruptive attacks, compromising networks to leak information, conducting information operations, and even tampering with physical world processes. They have leveraged their skills to gain notoriety and reputation, promote political ideologies, and actively support the strategic interests of nation-states. The anonymity provided by hacktivist personas coupled with the range of objectives supported by hacktivist tactics have made them a top choice for both state and non-state actors seeking to exert influence through the cyber domain.
This blog post presents Mandiant\'s analysis of the hacktivism threat landscape, and provides analytical tools to understand and assess the level of risk posed by these groups. Based on years of experience tracking hacktivist actors, their claims, and attacks, our insight is meant to help organizations understand and prioritize meaningful threat activity against their own networks and equities.
Figure 1: Sample of imagery used by hacktivists to promote their threat activity
Proactive Monitoring of Hacktivist Threats Necessary for Defenders to Anticipate Cyberattacks
Mandiant considers activity to be hacktivism when actors claim to or conduct attacks with the publicly stated intent of engaging in political or social activism. The large scale of hacktivism\'s resurgence presents a critical challenge to defenders who need to proactively sift through the noise and assess the risk posed by a multitude of actors with ranging degrees of sophistication. While in many cases hacktivist activity represents a marginal threat, in the most significant hacktivist operations Mandiant has tracked, threat actors have deliberately layered multiple tactics in hybrid operations in such a way that the effect of each component magnified the others. In some cases, hacktivist tactics have been deliberately employed by nation-state actors to support hybrid operations that can seriously harm victims. As the volume and complexity of activity grows and new actors leverage hacktivist tactics, defenders must determine how to filter, assess, and neutralize a range of novel and evolving threats. The proactive moni |
Malware
Tool
Threat
Legislation
Industrial
Cloud
Commercial
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APT 38
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★★★
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