The Evolving Threat Landscape - Looking at Our 2018 Predictions

By Derek Manky | August 29, 2018 Over the past several months, the FortiGuard Labs team has been tracking a number of evolving trends related to the FortiGuard 2018 Threat Landscape Predictions article published just before the beginning of the year. This mid-year update provides new details concerning recent advances in some of the techniques and malware tied to those predictions. In particular, the accelerated development of several precursors of Swarmbots and Hivenets are especially worth revisiting. Others include the increased targeting of critical infrastructure, the development of automation in malware exploits, and the use of blockchain technology to anonymize the command and control of botnets.
 

 
Of course, these trends aren’t happening in isolation. These threat trends are beginning to overlap at the same time that digital transformation is driving the convergence of traditionally isolated networks, including the growing integration of IT and OT networks within a single enterprise, along with the convergence of large systems to support massive, hyperconnected environments such as smart cities. For example, as developers actively add automation and new SCADA-focused exploits to their malware, they can be used to not only target traditional networks but OT networks as well, thereby enabling them to take out critical infrastructure. And to protect these attackers, we also see the emergence of blockchain-based command and control systems to protect the criminal organizations or nation-states that launch such attacks 
 
Full Article.