Destructive attacks surge for two-thirds of financial institutions globally

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of global financial institutions have experienced an increase in destructive attacks over the past year, with many fearing further threats as the war in Ukraine escalates.

Recently, VMware surveyed 130 financial sector CISOs and security managers globally and released the "Modern Bank Heists Report."

According to Tom Kellermann, head of cybersecurity strategy, the reported increase in destructive malware was up 17% from last year. Although criminals often use this technology to destroy evidence, leaving incident response teams with no evidence to go on, there is still a possibility of more attacks aimed primarily at erasing data.

"Destructive attacks are punitive attacks that destroy, disrupt, or degrade victim systems by taking actions such as encrypting files, deleting data, destroying hard drives, terminating connections, or executing malicious code."

"In fact, we recently witnessed destructive malware like HermeticWiper being launched after the Russia-Ukraine war started. Notably, most of the financial sector executives I interviewed for this report expressed concern about the secondary threats posed by the Russia-Ukraine war."

This week, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance repeatedly warned of potential threats from Russian state-sponsored attacks on critical Western infrastructure and cybercriminal groups in the region. Given the significant impact of economic sanctions on Russia, banks are highly likely to become targets of cyber retaliation.

The report also showed that 74% of respondents experienced at least one ransomware attack in the past year, with 63% paying the ransom, a figure Kellermann called "shocking."

He believes that ransomware-as-a-service offerings and remote access tools (RATs) have helped cybercriminals gain an edge in this area.

"There is a dangerous relationship between ransomware and these RATs, as these tools allow attackers to persist in the environment and establish a staging server that can be used to target other systems," Kellermann said.

"Once adversaries gain this limited access, they typically monetize it by extorting victims' data (including double and triple extortion) or by stealing resources from cloud services using cryptojacking attacks."

Once a ransomware attack is successful, the resulting losses are bound to be huge and irreversible. In a volatile global situation, financial institutions should stick to their security perimeters to ensure the effectiveness of their safety defense systems and leave no vulnerabilities.

In order to cope with the endless stream of attack methods, Security Validation provides clients with continuous validation services for the effectiveness of their security defense systems. Security Validation Labs has an outstanding security analysis team in the industry, providing clients with typical and popular APT attack methods collected from the Internet, tracking Internet hacker groups and vulnerabilities 24/7, and using the first-hand intelligence obtained to timely restore attack methods, providing validation methods for un-targeted enterprises, including security simulation of these destructive attacks, so that un-targeted enterprises can truly confirm whether their defense methods can detect or block these destructive attack behaviors.

| Reference Source

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/global-banks-surge-destructive/