World News – CA – Sophos 2021 Threat Report: Navigating Cybersecurity in an Uncertain World

We have integrated research from a number of threat prevention groups within Sophos, including SophosLabs, Sophos Managed Threat Response, Sophos Rapid Response, Sophos AI and our cloud security team to provide a comprehensive security landscape review.

In the report, you will also find useful details of how cybercriminals have diverted software that many of you may already be using on your private networks against you, with the goal of hiding in plain sight from your IT security team..

For example, here is an attack table showing the variety of tools used in the typical Dharma Ransomware invasion:

Learn about « living off the ground », where fraudsters use your tools against you, in the full report.

We’ve also provided a nice chart showing 20 years of malware history on one page, so you can see how we got to where we are now, from the « it’s all about worms » era to the present day, where « it’s all about With your data.

The report also includes a technical supplement from the Sophos AI team that gives you insight into how machine learning systems can help eliminate harmless objects from dangerous objects, even in a massive array of previously unknown and unseen files..

For example, imagine that you are a respondent to threats summoned by someone who has already been attacked by malware and wants to know what happened – and most importantly, what the fraudsters have left behind . . .

As you can imagine, it’s usually easy to find malware that actually launched the final portion of the attack, assuming it didn’t delete itself after that to make identification more difficult.

Tracking something when you have a good idea up front of what you are looking for is a bit like taking a trip using a road you’ve tried before, since you already have a good set of sights on your mind.

But what about everything else? What can you still trust? What if there were programs before the attack that were somehow not as safe as you thought and the scammers were being used as aid?

You can download everything, absolutely everything, and browse it using traditional analysis techniques for days – or possibly weeks or months..

However, even after you’re done, you might have very little or nothing to help you deal with future attacks, assuming those « future attacks » didn’t really happen while you were catching up..

Enter digital epidemiology, the inspiration for a malware handling tool that helps find needles in haystacks.

Hey, I think you might like to know there is a typo in the graph that sums up 20 years of threats: The 2008 malware called « Conficker » has an extra « l » in it.

Ooh, well spotted! (I had to zoom Firefox to 170% to see this clearly 🙂

Sophos, Ransomware, Computer Security, Computer, Threat