- New claims of mandating research cybercriminals are increasingly financially motivated
- The financial industry is the most important target for pirates
- These hackers use stolen exploits and identification information to access
New mandiant research has said that financially motivated actors are the new standard, with more than half (55%) of active threat groups in 2024 seeking to extort or steal money from their victims, a regular increase compared to previous years.
Unsurprisingly, ransomware incidents represented 21% of all intrusions in 2024 and constituted almost two thirds of the incidents involving monetization techniques. This comes next to the flight of data, the flight of cryptocurrency, compromises by email and the false North Korean campaign-all aimed at obtaining money from the victims.
The exploits were once again the most popular initial infection vector at 33%, monitoring of stolen identification information (16%), phishing (14%), web compromise (9%) and previous compromises (8%). This is not the first research to suggest that phishing attacks and stolen references increased in 2024, describing the popularity of tactics.
Risk finance
Finance was the most targeted industry, with just over 17% of the attacks that hit the sector. Commercial and professional services (11%), as well as critical industries such as high technology (10%), governments (10%) and health care (9%).
The fact that so many industries are targeted so largely, illustrates that no one is immune to the attacks sponsored by the State, whether financially or politically motivated.
“Financially motivated attacks are still the main category,” said Stuart McKenzie, director general, consulting Emea.
“While ransomware, data theft and multifaceted extortion are and will continue to be global concerns of significant cybercrime, we also follow the increase in the adoption of malware to infosteller and the exploitation of the development of web3 technologies, including cryptocurrencies.”
“The growing sophistication and automation offered by artificial intelligence still exacerbate these threats by allowing more targeted, evasive and generalized attacks. Organizations must proactively collect ideas to keep one step ahead of these trends and implement processes and tools to collect continuously and analyze the intelligence of threats from various sources. ”
