Cyber Defense Magazine - Annual RSA Conference 2019 - Print Edition

P3 - Nation-state hacking, it’s an emergency
The number of operations attributed to nation-state attackers will increase
in the next months. The lack of a global framework of norms of
state behaviour in the cyber space and the absence of severe sanctions
for rogue states will encourage state-sponsored hacking. Government
will continue to carry out cyber espionage and sabotage
campaigns, Russia, China and North Korea will be most aggressive
countries in the cyber arena. While China will be more focused on
cyber espionage, North Korea will focus its operations on stealing
funds due to the sanctions against its Government. The most dreaded
state will be Russia, its state-sponsored hackers will be more focused
on cyber espionage and on online misinformation.
In this scenario, other APT groups, such as Iran-linked cyber espionage
crews, will be very active in 2019.
P4 – Supply Chain attacks on the rise
Threat actors, especially state-sponsored attackers, will focus their
efforts in compromising the supply chain of popular software to hit a
wide audience. Threat actors implant malware into legitimate applications
replacing their software update with tainted versions. In this
way, every user receiving the update will automatically have their
system compromised.
In the last months security experts discovered several attacks against
supply chain of popular applications. In August, experts from Trend
Micro uncovered the Operation Red Signature, attackers compromised
update server of a remote support solutions provider in South
Korea and delivered a remote access Trojan (RAT) used to steal sensitive
information from the victims.
In July Microsoft revealed that hackers attempted to compromise
the supply chain of an unnamed maker of PDF software.
Experts fear that a growing number of threat actors will target the
supply chain in the next months due to the efficiency of this attack
scheme. The attacks will be more sophisticated and could be hard to
detect.
6 Cyber Defense Magazine - Annual Print Edition 2019