2020’s criminal momentum is expected to carry into 2021, and it’s clearly doing so.
COVID-19 driven social engineering.
KnowBe4, for example, announces the appearance of COVID-19 vaccine phishbait. It’s unlikely to go away soon: expect this chum to be scattered across inboxes well into 2021. And Armorblox this morning released updates on some representative COVID-19 scams.
Reuters sees the same sort of thing. One trend, surprising at first blush, but which on reflection seems right, is that COVID-19 concerns appear to have driven a rise in romance scams. Under lockdown, apparently, people are looking for love in all the wrong places. (But that Robin Sage...she seems nice…)
Ransomware: focused, smarter, faster.
G-Data summarizes the coming evolution of ransomware by noting that the extortionists will become smarter, more focused, and above all faster. The increased speed, ZDNet points out, is worrisome: the hoods will be likelier to pivot and encrypt before they’re detected, getting inside the defenders’ OODA loop.
The phishbait is getting better design, too. Bitdefender sees scammers upping their game in impersonating financial services: the language and the logos, for example, much cleaner and more convincing than they’ve historically been.
Other trends: stalkerware and more action from the DPRK.
Other things to worry about? There’s stalkerware, which has drawn attention with reports that lawful intercept tools are proliferating into the hands of unlawful users.
And of course there are North Korean cyber attack units, which the National Interest thinks aren’t receiving the attention their level of threat warrants. It’s not all mom and kimchi in Pyongyang, whatever the Dear Successor may be woofing nowadays.