Crime-as-a-service fuels cyber attacks: Fortinet

Source: Fortinet infographic. Ransomware hits nearly 10% of organisations.

Fortinet, the global provider of high-performance cybersecurity solutions, today announced the findings of its latest Global Threat Landscape Report*. The data spans the cybersecurity kill chain focusing on three central aspects of the landscape, including application exploits, malicious software, and botnets against the backdrop of key enterprise technology and industry sector trends.

Threat trends reflect the environment in which they occur, therefore, understanding how information technologies, services, controls, and behaviours change over time is important. They can act as a window into broader security policies and governance models and are valuable to monitoring the evolution of exploits, malware, and botnets as networks become increasingly complex and distributed.

The research reveals that while more high profile attacks have dominated the headlines, the reality is that the majority of threats faced by most organisations are opportunistic in nature, fuelled by a pervasive crime-as-a-service infrastructure. Three important research highlights are:

Attack tools are always ready for use

Modern tools and crime-as-a-service infrastructures enable adversaries to operate on a global scale at light speed. As a result, most threat trends appear more global than regional. Adversaries are always on the attack, looking for the element of surprise, whenever possible, on an international scale. The recent attacks from WannaCry ransomware and its variants was just such a surprise, achieving great scale with hundreds of organisations affected across the world at once.

Ransomware: Just under 10% of organisations detected activity associated with ransomware. On any given day, an average of 1.2% dealt with ransomware botnets running somewhere in their environment. The peak days of activity fell on weekends, with the hope of slipping traffic past weekend security operations staff. As the average traffic volume of various ransomware botnets increased, the average number of firms impacted by them rose as well.

Exploit trends: 80% of organisations reported high or critical-severity exploits against their systems. The majority of these targeted vulnerabilities were released in the last five years, but no shortage of attempts was made against pre-Millennial common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). Exploit distribution was pretty consistent across geographical regions, likely because a huge proportion of exploit activity is fully automated via tools that methodically scan wide swathes of the Internet probing for opportunistic openings.

Hyperconvergence and the Internet of Things (IoT) accelerate the spread of malware

As networks and users increasingly share information and resources, attacks are spreading rapidly across distributed geographic areas and a wide variety of industries. Studying malware can help provide views into the preparation and intrusion stages of these attacks. Although protecting against mobile malware is particularly challenging because devices are not shielded on the internal network, are frequently joining public networks, and often are not under corporate ownership or control.

Mobile malware: The prevalence of mobile malware remained steady from Q416 to Q117, with about 20% of organisations detecting it. More Android malware families made the top 10 list by volume or prevalence this quarter. The overall ratio among all types of malware was 8.7% for Q1 comparing to Q4’s 1.7%.

Regional prevalence: Mobile malware prevalence rose in every region except the Middle East. The rate of growth was statistically significant in all cases, excluding random variation. Compared to some other regional threat comparisons, Android malware appeared to have stronger geographic tendencies.

Control of distributed and elastic infrastructure diminishes

Visibility and control over today’s infrastructures are diminishing as the number of potential attack vectors across the expanded network landscape continues to grow. The rush to adopt private and public cloud solutions, the growth of IoT, the variety and volume of smart devices connecting to the network, and out-of-band threat vectors like shadow IT have stretched security professionals past their limits.

Encrypted traffic: The median ratio of HTTPS to HTTP traffic hit a high mark of nearly 55%. While helpful for maintaining privacy, this trend presents challenges to threat monitoring and detection. Many defensive tools have poor visibility into encrypted communications. Organisations—especially those with higher HTTPS ratios—could face threats lurking within encrypted communications.

Applications: The median number of cloud applications used per organisation was 62, which is roughly a third of all applications detected, with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) applications hitting a new high point. For many of these organisations, the challenge is that data visibility can drop significantly once it moves into the cloud. In addition, data stored in these applications and services continues to grow.

Industry sectors: Cluster analysis by vertical industry shows that the attack surface across most industries was the same with a few exceptions such as the education and telco sectors. This means that adversaries can easily exploit attack surfaces with the same methods across industries easily, especially with automated tools.

In Asia Pacific (APAC), the exploit trends show similarities to trends globally and in other regions. For example, the top exploit detected in all regions is related to the 2014 Shellshock bug. And both globally and in APAC, the majority of malware infections are tied to ransomware droppers such as Nemucod. Lastly, the top botnet activity globally is related to Andromeda, and the same is observed in APAC. Fortinet notes that the Internet is not bound by geographic distances and boundaries, so most threat trends appear more global than regional.

“In the past year, highly-publicised cybersecurity incidents have raised public awareness of how our TVs and phones can be manipulated to deny others’ Internet availability, and have shown, that demanding ransom is being used to disrupt vital patient care services. Yet, awareness alone isn’t enough. Unfortunately, as organisations increasingly adopt convenience and cost-savings IT techniques, such as cloud services, or add a variety of smart devices to their network, visibility and control of their security is at risk. Meanwhile, attackers are buying or re-using tools of their own. Cybersecurity strategies need to increasingly adopt trustworthy network segmentation and high degrees of automation to prevent and detect adversaries’ efforts to target the newly-exposed flanks of our businesses and governments,” said Phil Quade, Chief Information Security Officer, Fortinet.

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*The Fortinet Global Threat Landscape report is a quarterly view that represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs drawn from Fortinet’s array of network devices and sensors within production environments during Q117. Research data covers global, regional, industry sector, and organisational perspectives. It also focuses on three central and complementary aspects of the threat landscape: application exploits, malicious software, and botnets. In addition, Fortinet publishes a free, subscription-based Threat Intelligence Brief that reviews the top malware, virus, and web-based threats discovered every week, along with links to that week’s most valuable Fortinet research.