Cybercrime Evolves with Advanced Tools

Day-by-day the attacks over cyber is increasing and evolves with the advanced tools. Enterprises everywhere need to watch out! With cybercriminals increasing their ambitions, constantly evolving hacking techniques year over year, and with emerging technologies providing more attack surface for hackers, executives and IT leaders must plan for the inevitable. IT leaders and IT professionals must know how to handle these attacks and how to respond to it.

The most recent and advanced tool used in cyber-attack is

AI- and ML-Driven Attacks

Machine learning (ML)and Artificial Intelligence (AI)the most competitive technology now enters into the cyber world becoming “table stacks” in all modern security strategies. As it is most readily available in masses, hackers use this for their attacks where it can be multiplied and can reach great heights. Thus, it’s crucial for all companies to heighten their awareness around the latest cybersecurity threats.

Botnet attacks and the poisoning of machine learning systems have become vogue in this year. Artificial intelligence has found a new application, it is being used as malware and botnet to attack data and devices more efficiently. According to Threat Intelligence Report released by Nokia, IoT bots now make up 16% of the infected devices observed, up significantly from 3.5% a year ago. These bots actively scan for vulnerable victims using an increasingly rich suite of attacks, possibly AI-driven. Among smartphones, Android devices are the most commonly targeted by malware. In mobile networks, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones for less than 1%.

Many of these IoT botnets leverage the basic architecture and functionality of the Mirai source code that was released in October 2016.

Leaks by Instagram

One of the most popular social media applications came under cyber-attack twice last year. In August, many of the users were logged out of their accounts, account information like name, password and phone number was changed by the hackers. Ref

Photo by Pete Pedroza on Unsplash

Also, in November, Instagram was affected by a bug which led to a data breach. Users who updated the platform changes and used the new platform discovered that their passwords were showing in the URL of their web browsers. Affected users were cautioned to change their passwords and delete browser history. But at least 49 million users’ data was leaked to the internet because of unprotected AWS servers connected to the internet. The leak was discovered on May 20, 2019. The AWS Server belonged to a Mumbai based marketing company Chtrbox which has been unprotected roughly for 72 hours. This Instagram breach is yet another in a long list of AWS databases connected to the internet without proper security.