State-sponsored groups will target the world’s cryptocurrency industry next year, while cybercriminals will take advantage of investors by fabricating rogue wallet with backdoors included, said cybersecurity company Kaspersky as one of the key predictions in its latest report Cyberthreats to Financial Organisations in 2022. Moreover, growth in attacks against payment systems and more advanced mobile threats are also expected in the coming year. “2021 was a year of challenge and novelty and there always are those who adapt and manage change to their advantage quickly – cybercriminals. Since most of them are motivated by money, financial threats have always been one of the most significant parts of the threat landscape,” Kaspersky said. The report comes amid cybercriminals targeting Bitcoin and other cryptos to siphon off investors’ money.
The report forecasted several tendencies, surrounding crypto, expected to occur in 2022 such as growth in targetted cryptocurrency attacks. As cryptocurrency is a digital asset and all transactions take place online, it offers anonymity to users. “These are attractive features for cybercrime groups. However, it’s not only cybercriminal organizations but state-sponsored threat actors who have targetted this industry,” the report noted. For instance, advanced persistent threat (APT) groups attacking the cryptocurrency business. Kaspersky anticipates that this activity will continue.
“This year has been challenging for many organizations: handling remote access for ad-hoc employees, patching hard systems connected to the Internet to endure ransomware attacks, dealing with a substantial increase of mobile banking and its malware implants. And cybercriminals have not been shy of taking advantage of attacking markets. We have watched very regional cybercriminals shifting to other world regions making cybersecurity people work harder,” said Dmitry Bestuzhev, Head of Global Research and Analysis Team — Latin America, Kaspersky in a statement.
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With respect to crypto investment opportunities, Kaspersky researchers noted that cybercriminals will take advantage of manufacturing and retailing rogue devices with backdoors, followed by social engineering campaigns and other techniques to steal victims’ financial assets.
Moreover, infostealers (information stealers), which is a kind of malware that steals sensitive and information from the compromised system, will see acceleration at least as a first-stage data collector, the report added. The attacks here won’t be limited to targetted ransomware attacks, traditional targetted attacks, and others. “Different threat actors will take advantage of it to profile victims for further attacks.” Further, more mobile banking Trojans for the Android platform, particularly remote access Trojan (RAT), which can circumvent security measures by banks such as OTP and multi-factor authentication, are expected next year.
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