Fortinet Threat Landscape Report Reveals Visibility and Control of Distributed Infrastructures Have Diminished as Number of Potential Attack Vectors Continues to Grow
Research Demonstrates Highly Automated Cyber Defenses are Critical to Mitigate Pervasive “Cybercrime-as-a-Service” Attacks
Fortinet 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 important enterprise technology and industry sector trends. The research reveals that while more high profile attacks have dominated the headlines, the reality is that the majority of threats faced by most organizations are opportunistic in nature fueled by a pervasive Crime-as-a-Service infrastructure. For a detailed view of the findings and some important takeaways for CISOs read our blog. Three important research highlights follow:
1) Attack Tools Never Forget and Are Always Ready for Service, Anywhere and Anytime
Modern tools and Crime-as-a-Service infrastructures enable adversaries to operate on a global scale at light speed. As a result, the Internet seems not interested in geographic distances or boundaries because 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.
Understanding exploit trends or how ransomware works and spreads, the better we can avoid the impact caused by the next WannaCry. The malicious ransomware and its variants achieved great scale with hundreds of organizations affected across the world at once.
2) Hyper-convergence and IoT Are Accelerating 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.
3) Visibility of Distributed and Elastic Infrastructure is Diminishing
Threat trends reflect the environment in which they occur, therefore, understanding how information technologies, services, controls, and behaviors change over time is important. It can act as a window into broader security policies and governance models and is valuable to monitoring the evolution of exploits, malware, and botnets as networks become increasingly complex and distributed. 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.
In Asia Pacific, the exploit trends show similarities to global and other regions’ trends. For example, the top exploit detected in all regions are 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. As highlighted earlier, the Internet is not bound by geographic distances and boundaries, so most threat trends appear more global than regional.
Phil Quade, chief information security officer, Fortinet said, “In the past year, highly-publicized cybersecurity incidents have raised public awareness of how our TVs & 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 organizations 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.”
The Fortinet Global Threat Landscape report is a quarterly view that represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs drawn from Fortinet’s vast array of network devices and sensors within production environments during Q1 2017. Research data covers global, regional, industry sector, and organizational 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.
