Security News > 2023 > June > Cybercriminals return to business as usual in a post-pandemic world

As COVID-19 medical and economic programs began to wind down, attackers had to find new ways to make a living by honing their social engineering skills, commoditising once-sophisticated attack techniques, and creatively searching for new opportunities in unexpected places.

From scaling brute-force and targeted attacks on cloud tenants to the surge in conversational smishing attacks and proliferation of multifactor authentication bypass, the cyber-attack landscape witnessed significant developments on several fronts in 2022.

"With Microsoft 365 forming a large percentage of the typical organization's attack surface, broad abuse of that platform, from Office macros to OneNote documents, continues to shape the broad outlines of the threat landscape," said Ryan Kalember, EVP, cybersecurity strategy, Proofpoint.

"As security controls have slowly improved, threat actors have innovated and scaled their bypasses; once the domain of red teams, techniques like MFA bypass and telephone-oriented attack delivery, for example, are now commonplace. While many threat actors are still experimenting, what remains the same is that attackers exploit people, and they are the most critical variable in today's attack chain." added Kalember.

From complex techniques like multi-factor authentication bypass, to telephone-oriented attack delivery, and conversational threats that rely solely on the attacker's charm, 2022 was a year of unprecedented creativity among threat actors as they varied attack chains and rapidly tested and discarded delivery mechanisms.

While financially driven crime largely dominates the post-pandemic threat landscape, a single outlier attack by an Advanced Persistent Threat actor can have a massive impact: One large campaign by TA471, a Russian-aligned APT group that engages in both corporate and government espionage, propelled that actor to the top of the APT message volume charts.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/06/16/post-pandemic-threat-landscape/