Deepfake Attacks & Cyber Extortion

After taking a deep dive into the challenges faced by security teams amid pandemic disruptions, burnout, and geo-politically motivated cyberattacks Vmware released a report that says, 65% of defenders state that cyberattacks have increased since Russia invaded Ukraine. The report also shines a light on emerging threats such as deepfakes, attacks on APIs, and cybercriminals targeting incident responders themselves.

Cybercriminals are now incorporating deepfakes into their attack methods to evade security controls, say Experts at VMware. Two out of three respondents in its report saw malicious deepfakes used as part of an attack, a 13% increase from last year, with email as the top delivery method.

Cybercriminals have evolved beyond using synthetic video and audio simply for influence operations or disinformation campaigns. Their new goal is to use deepfake technology to compromise organizations and gain access to their environment.

Other key findings are, organizations are working to combat this, however, with more than two-thirds of respondents stating their workplaces have implemented wellness programs to address burnout.

Ransomware actors incorporate cyber extortion strategies. The predominance of ransomware attacks, often buttressed by e-crime groups’ collaborations on the dark web, has yet to let up. 57% of respondents have encountered such attacks in the past 12 months, and two-thirds (66%) have encountered affiliate programs and/or partnerships between ransomware groups as prominent cyber cartels continue to extort organizations through double extortion techniques, data auctions, and blackmail.

APIs are the new endpoints, representing the next frontier for attackers. As workloads and applications proliferate, 23% of attacks now compromise API security.

The top types of API attacks include data exposure (encountered by 42% of respondents in the past year), SQL and API injection attacks (37% and 34%, respectively), and distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (33%).

In order to defend against the broadening attack surface, security teams need an adequate level of visibility across workloads, devices, users and networks to detect, protect, and respond to cyber threats.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA