Report: Cybercriminals Launching More Intricate, Targeted Attacks

Despite the high-profile takedown of Altenen—a major hacker hub—in May 2018, the financial services sector and related industries continue to face a daunting threat landscape, according to two new reports.

IntSights’ recently released “Banking & Financial Services Cyberthreat Landscape Report” identified significant fallout from the January 2019 megabreach known as “Collections #1-5,” in which roughly 2.2 billion records of login credentials and personal information from around the world were leaked to hackers. Those breaches were largely responsible for a 129 percent year-over-year increase in leaked credentials.

Among other key findings was a 212 percent year-over-year increase in instances of compromised credit cards, which were primarily used to make small purchases to reduce the risk of being detected. The report also identified a 102 percent year-over-year increase in malicious applications, such as fraudulent mobile banking apps that imitate major blue-chip banking apps. That type of malicious application is particularly concerning because more than one-third of consumers are fooled by fraudulent banking apps, according to IntSights.

The reports also found that cybercriminals are honing and expanding their attacking methods. The IntSights report found that banking and financial services organizations were targeted in 26 percent of all malware attacks in 2018, more than any of the other 27 industries studied. Ransomware also continued to pose a significant threat, enabling criminals to execute costly denials of service, such as the February 2019 incident at a bank in Mexico.

Similarly, Accenture identified “big game hunting,” or threat actors and groups targeting institutions for financial gain, as a trend in its recently published “2019 Cyber Threatscape Report.” More cybercriminals also are sharing tools that automate the process of mass-producing malicious documents to spread malware, according to the report.

In addition to sending malware to internet users via phishing emails, some cybercriminals are now executing malware attacks executed through web browsers and targeting online merchants and retailers. And threats are expanding throughout the supply chain. “The global interconnectedness of business, the wider adoption of traditional industry cyberthreat countermeasures, and improvements to basic cybersecurity hygiene appear to be pushing cyberthreat actors to seek new avenues to compromise organizations, such as targeting their supply chains—including those for software, hardware, and the cloud,” Accenture noted.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2019 edition of Transaction Trends magazine. Click here to read the full issue.

Interested in cybersecurity? Check out the Electronic Transactions Association’s cybersecurity resource page here.