Data breaches will only become more costly for affected companies, Acronis predicts. Phishing and ransomware remain the biggest threats in the cybersecurity landscape.
December is the month of the annual overviews, so Acronis also takes a look a research report back on the most striking cybersecurity trends of the second half of the year. They give a good picture of what cybercrime will have in store in 2023. These are the recipes that are now known, which are being further refined.
$4.35 million. This is how high IBM estimated the average cost of a data breach in the Cost of a Data Breachreport it published in July. In 2023, the cost of a data breach will only increase, according to Acronis researchers, to more than 5 million euros.
MFA: from protection to weapon
To obtain that valuable data, cyber criminals today have a wide arsenal of weapons at their disposal. Acronis sees new threats emerging, but attackers also continue to apply the ‘proven scenarios’ to make their move.
A script that has proven itself countless times is phishing. This technique would now account for no less than three out of four cyber attacks per email. The share of social engineering, whereby the attackers try to obtain the login details in a friendlier manner, also increases to three percent.
read also
What is MFA and how secure is it really?
One of the newer threats emerging is “MFA fatigue.” Meanwhile, the understanding of multi-factor authentication is becoming established in many organizations. However, hackers seem to have discovered to bypass MFAand this worries Candid Wuëst of Acronis: “Attackers are constantly refining their methods and are now using popular security tools like MFA against us”.
Attackers are now using popular security tools like MFA against us.
Candid Wuest, Vice President Cyber Protection Research at Acronis
Ransomware: less volume, more danger
The threat of ransomware is of course also extensively discussed in the Acronis report. The decrease in the number of ransomware incidents in the second half of 2022 is striking: 12.9 percent in September and four percent in October. However, the danger is far from over: every month two hundred to three hundred new victims are added.
Acronis notes that a handful of groups dominate the ransomware market. Lockbit, Hive, Blackcat and Black Basta are names that are often mentioned in ransomware incidents. Under the impetus of the ‘ransomware as a service’ model, hacker groups organize themselves as professional companies.
read also
Ransomware for everyone: how RaaS is turning the rules of the game upside down
This allows them to improve their techniques and increase the attack surface. Ransomware will spread more towards macOS and Linux systems in 2023. We already learned from the Orange Cyberdefense Security Navigator 2023 that Europe is the new hot spot for ransomware. Companies will therefore have to walk on the tips of their toes every day.
