The ransomware landscape is evolving with increased competition among threat groups and the emergence of new ransomware operations. However, victim organizations and potential targets are strengthening their security measures and procedures to prepare for potential ransomware attacks. Our latest quarterly report for Q1 2024 shows a significant decrease in ransomware incidents, down to 1,048 cases, representing a 22% decline compared to Q4 2023.

Security researchers have identified a vulnerability, CVE-2024-27322, in the R programming language that permits arbitrary code execution by deserializing untrusted data. This flaw can be exploited when loading RDS (R Data Serialization) files or packages, which are commonly shared among developers and data scientists. An attacker can craft malicious RDS files or packages containing embedded arbitrary R code, triggering execution on the victim’s device upon interaction.

The complex geopolitical landscape in Southeast Asia, influenced by People’s republic of China (PRC)’s strategic interests and territorial disputes, faces a prominent offensive threat from Chinese cyber operations. Southeast Asia’s economic and digital growth make it a prime target for cyber threats. In the past 8 months Cyberint has been able to identify a major large-scale campaign.

Supply chain attacks are a growing and increasingly sophisticated form of cyber threat. They target the complex network of relationships between organizations and their suppliers, vendors, and third-party service providers. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities that emerge due to the interconnected nature of digital supply chains, which often span multiple organizations, systems, and geographies.

Responsible for a number of infamous ‘big game hunter’ ransomware attacks and believed active since at least 2019, the ransomware threat group dubbed ‘CL0P‘ is thought to be a Russian-language cybercriminal gang and have been widely reported as associated with, or their malware adopted by, other cybercriminal groups including ‘FIN11’, a part of the larger financially-motivated ‘TA505’ group, and ‘UNC2546’.

Cyber threats against critical infrastructure – such as energy and transportation networks – remain pervasive as ever, with 2023 witnessing an astounding 420 million such attacks in total. That’s the bad news. The good news is that critical infrastructure is set to become more secure, at least in the European Union, thanks to the NIS 2 Directive (also known as E.U. Directive 2022/2055).

In April 2023, Researchers uncovered a new ransomware actor named RA Group, demonstrating a connection to the Babuk ransomware through the utilization of leaked source code. Following the full disclosure of Babuk’s ransomware source code by an alleged group member in September 2021, various ransomware families have emerged, incorporating this leaked code into their attacks.

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is used to evaluate and communicate the technical severity of software, hardware and firmware vulnerabilities. While CVSS has been around for nearly 2 decades and now stands as an industry standard tool for scoring the severity of a vulnerability, the framework still has its limitations. To mitigate some of these challenges and improve the efficacy of the system, an updated version of CVSS was released in November 2023.