Expanding Knowledge by Sharing Intrusion Realities

Security practitioners faced a series of challenges in this past year which forced organizations into uncharted waters . As ransomware operators were attacking state and municipal networks alongside hospitals and schools , a global pandemic response to COVID-19 necessitated a move to remote work for a significant portion of the economy . Organizations had to adopt new technologies and quickly scale outside of their normal growth plans .

As organizations settled into a new understanding of “ normal ,” UNC2452 , a suspected nation-state threat actor , conducted one of the most advanced cyber espionage campaigns in recent history . Many security teams were forced to suspend wide-ranging analyses around the adoption of remote work policies and instead focus on a supply chain attack from a trusted platform .

Nation states taking a cyber espionage approach to COVID research , threat groups working together to achieve their objectives , exploitation of quickly adopted work from home strategies and a wake-up call for global supply chain compromise – experiences in 2020 will shape security policies for years to come .

Themes covered in M-Trends 2021 include :

• 59 % of the security incidents investigated by Mandiant last year were initially detected by the organizations themselves , an improvement of 12 % from the prior year .

• Ransomware has evolved into multifaceted extortion where actors not only deploy ransomware encryptors across victim environments , but also employ a variety of other extortion tactics to coerce victims into complying with demands .

• FIN11 , a recently named financially motivated threat group , was responsible for widespread phishing campaigns , that conducted several multifaceted extortion operations . �

12 intelligent

. tech

Intelligent SME . tech