Cybercrime , Fraud Management & Cybercrime , Fraud Risk Management

Top Cybersecurity Challenge: 'More Capable Threat Actors'

The pace of online crime hasn't flagged so far this year, as hackers - both criminals and nation-states - have retooled many of their attacks to take advantage of the ongoing pandemic, says Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee.

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At the same time, they also continue to innovate, including a massive increase in the use of Powershell and other "living off the land" tactics, McAfee has found. There's also been a steady rise in ransomware gangs exfiltrating data and threatening to leak it as further inducement for victims to pay them a ransom.

"it's been a really busy couple of months, not only in terms of prevalence, but I think predominantly also because you've seen these more capable threat actors as well." Samani says. "During lockdown, cybercrime didn't shut down - it's probably one of the few sectors that actually thrived, as opposed to say, for example, traditional crime."

In this in-depth video interview, Samani also discusses:

• Threat trends: Diving into the new McAfee Labs COVID-19 Threats Report;
• Operation North Star: How a hacking group is using template infection attacks to target the defense and aerospace sectors with fake job offers;
• A deep dive into the Netwalker ransomware gang as well as the rise in "post-intrusion ransomware" data-exfiltration schemes.

Samani is the chief scientist of McAfee and a cybersecurity adviser to EU's law enforcement agency, Europol.