Financial threats in 2021: cryptocurrency transit, web skimmers move to the server side and extortion plague – Business Review

In 2021, many financial cybercriminals are likely to target Bitcoin more often, while other cybercriminals will switch to transit cryptocurrencies when demanding payment from victims for enhanced privacy. On top of that, extortion practices will become even more widespread, be it as part of DDoS or ransomware attacks, with the operators of the latter consolidating and using advanced exploits to target victims. These are the key predictions from Kaspersky regarding anticipated changes in the financial sectors threat landscape.

Financial cyberthreats are among the most dangerous as they directly impact the financial wellbeing of victims be it individuals or organizations. Drastic changes in 2020 unavoidably affected the way financial attackers operate. Albeit not all of the tactics, techniques and procedures have been influenced by the change of how we live and work nowadays, their influence cannot be understated. Based on a review of what has happened over 2020, Kaspersky researchers were able to prepare a forecast of the important developments in the financial threat landscape of 2021 in order to help organizations prepare for these new threats better. Here is a summary of their key predictions:

This year was substantially different from any other year we experienced, and yet, many trends that we anticipated to come to life last year came true regardless of this transformation of how we live. These include new strategies in financial cybercrime from reselling bank access to targeting investment applications and the further development of already existing trends, for instance, even greater expansion of card skimming and ransomware being used to target banks. Forecasting upcoming threats is important, as it enables us to better prepare to defend ourselves against them, and we are confident our forecast will help many cybersecurity professionals to work on their threat model, says Dmitry Bestuzhev, a security researcher at Kaspersky.

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Financial threats in 2021: cryptocurrency transit, web skimmers move to the server side and extortion plague - Business Review