The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) newly-released Internet Crimes Report provides an unbiased big picture of the cyber crimes that were the most used and most successful. A few weeks ago we covered the alarming trends on ransomware, and FBI’s IC3 division took in over 880,000 complaints last year from individuals and businesses about every cyber crime being committed. Unfortunately, the details on overall cyber crime show things are not improving.

New data shows increased expertise in leveraging and exploiting cloud environments. CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report shows that targeted attacks on cloud environments have increased, signaling that the cybercrime economy has realized the “untapped market” of the cloud environment.

In an age when 70% - 90% of successful data breaches involve social engineering (which gets past all other defenses), sufficient training is needed to best reduce human-side cybersecurity risk. Everyone should be trained in how to recognize social engineering attempts, how to mitigate (i.e., delete, ignore, etc.) them, and how to appropriately report them if in a business scenario. The amount of time an organization should devote to security awareness training (SAT) is still up for debate.

The threat group "RA World" (formerly RA Group) has shifted from country-specific ransomware attacks to include specific industries via a new - not previously seen - method of extortion. I don’t like it when I hear about ransomware groups growing, but that's the case in TrendMicro’s new analysis of RA World ransomware. What was once through to be a smaller operation focused on attacks targeting organizations in South Korea and the U.S.

The following paragraphs were cited directly from my recent article highlighting social engineering. "Social engineering and phishing are involved in 70% to 90% of all successful cybersecurity attacks. No other initial root hacking cause comes close. This is not a recent development. Social engineering has been the number one type of attack since the beginning of networked computers. Despite this long-time fact, most organizations do not spend 3% of their IT/IT Security budget to fight it.

Researchers at IBM X-Force are monitoring several ongoing phishing campaigns by the Russian state-sponsored threat actor ITG05 (also known as “APT28” or “Fancy Bear”). APT28 has been tied to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

New analysis shows that the combination of phishing, email, remote access, and compromised accounts are the focus for most threat actors. Data across the industry corroborates new findings in cyber risk advisory and response firm Kroll’s just-released Q4 2023 Cyber Threat Landscape Report. But what’s interesting in this report is how the data tells a story of where organizations are falling short in their preventative efforts.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept but a tool that is driving operational efficiency, customer experience, and decision-making processes. Organizations are observing its transformative power firsthand across various industries and organizational aspects.

A joint cybersecurity advisory published last week discusses ransomware attack impacts on healthcare, along with ALPHV’s attack techniques, indicators of compromise (IoCs) and proper response actions. ALPHV is a big enough problem that Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) all are getting together to put healthcare organizations on notice.