Unique Attack Trends to Watch for in 2024 and Beyond
Cybercriminals will continue to rely on specific fan-favorite tactics that have enabled them time and time again to achieve their goals. However, modern attackers have more tools at their disposal today than ever before, including a growing number of CaaS offerings and AI-driven technologies to help them work smarter and faster at every stage of an attack. As the cybercrime industry evolves, we’ll see distinct new attack trends emerging in 2024 and beyond. Here’s a look at several anticipated developments that will keep security teams everywhere on their toes.
Next-level playbooks
If there was a popularity contest among types of cyberattacks, ransomware would surely earn top marks. Over the past few years, the volume of ransomware attacks worldwide has skyrocketed, making every organization, regardless of size or industry, a target. According to our 1H 2023 FortiGuard Labs Threat Landscape report, ransomware activity was 13 times higher at the end of the first half of 2023 than at the start of the year. And despite 78% of business leaders saying they felt prepared to defend against ransomware, half still fell victim to an attack.
Attackers continue to up the ante by embracing more sophisticated and complex strains to infiltrate networks—including highly destructive disk-wiping malware, which we covered in our 2023 predictions report—largely thanks to the rapid expansion of RaaS operations. However, as an increasing number of cybercriminals launch ransomware attacks in hopes of achieving a lucrative payday, cybercrime groups are quickly pivoting from smaller, easier-to-hack targets.
As a result, we anticipate that cybercriminals will become more aggressive and expand both their respective target lists and their playbooks. We’ll see adversaries looking for big payouts turn their focus to critical industries such as healthcare, utilities, manufacturing, and finance, seeking out targets that, if successfully disrupted, would have a substantially adverse impact on society. In addition to setting their sights on higher-value targets, attackers will move beyond the plays they’ve built already. Their playbooks will become more aggressive and destructive in nature, shifting away from encryption and instead focusing on denial of service and extortion.
Despite going after high-value targets, at some point, this list of targets will dry up. This begs the question of who (or what industry) cybercriminals will set their sights on next. As adversaries are forced to adjust their strategies, cyber insurers may become attractive targets. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a trend in which organizations were compensating for gaps in their strategy by loading up on cyber insurance. But as ransomware intensifies, cyber insurers are becoming more particular regarding when and how they distribute payouts. That money will eventually become restricted as cyber insurers become increasingly stringent and ransom payouts become less frequent. We haven’t observed cyber-insurance companies being targeted directly by attackers yet, but it’s possible the industry could be viewed as a high-value target in the future, particularly as insurance companies restrict those payments downstream.
A new (and more lucrative) day for zero days
As organizations continue to expand the number of platforms, applications, and technologies they rely on to support daily business operations, cybercriminals have ample new opportunities to uncover and exploit software vulnerabilities. Case in point: We’ve observed a record number of zero days and new CVEs emerge in 2023, and that count is still rising. This lengthy list includes the MOVEit Transfer hack that impacted at least 60 million individuals, dubbed the “largest hack of the year so far.” New zero days discovered are quite profitable, but because they’re so valuable, we expect many to go unreported. Unreported
zero days are understandably more valuable to attackers—they can make more money exploiting a zero day that most aren’t even aware of yet—which means security teams will need to become increasingly vigilant. And let’s not forget about the rise of N-days, which we think of as zero days with an extended shelf life. These vulnerabilities could pose a risk for a long time, even several years. Although N-days are known vulnerabilities, they still present a risk for organizations if they haven’t been patched or don’t have a patch available.
Zero-day attacks won’t be slowing anytime soon; in fact, we expect to see zero-day brokers—cybercrime groups selling zero days on the dark web to multiple buyers—emerge among the CaaS community. The rise of zero-day brokers will pave the way for cybercriminals to scale their efforts and reach a broader attack surface through more coordinated campaigns. We’ll see this shift occur due to a growing attack surface with non-hardened products, which allows attackers to operationalize exploits for the tens of thousands of CVEs that are bound to be discovered.
There are many steps organizations can take today to guard against zero-day vulnerabilities, such as using next-generation firewalls, conducting vulnerability scanning, and implementing a smart patch management strategy. Yet these tools and activities are all designed to guard against vulnerabilities only after they’re discovered. Engineering teams have an opportunity to help slow the growth of zero-day exploits by enhancing their software development life-cycle (SDL) methodologies. While cybercriminals use fuzzing—an automated software testing technique designed to uncover software bugs—to find new vulnerabilities to exploit, development teams can also use fuzzing to beat attackers at their own game. Developers should consider incorporating fuzzing into their SDL processes, which can help with hardening products and enhancing security and finding and fixing potential bugs before the adversaries do.
The inside game
In response to the evolving threat landscape, many enterprises are leveling up their security controls and adopting new technologies and processes to strengthen their defenses. These enhanced controls make it more difficult for attackers to infiltrate a network externally, requiring cybercriminals to find new ways to reach their targets
Given this change, we predict that attackers will continue to shift left with their tactics, reconnaissance, and weaponization, with groups beginning to recruit from inside target organizations for initial access purposes. For example, cybercriminals could easily use generative AI to clone the voices of executives or trusted individuals, using those recordings to compel an unsuspecting target to execute commands, disclose passwords or data, or release funds. We could easily see Recruitment-as-a-Service evolve as the next phase of this trend, allowing attackers to gain access to more information to profile their targets.
While some targets may unknowingly fall victim to a cybercrime scheme, other employees may view a one-time collaboration with cybercriminals as a way to augment their salaries with quick cash.
“We the people” attacks
In 2024, we expect to see attackers take advantage of more tailored and event-driven opportunities, such as the 2024 United States elections and the Paris 2024 games. While adversaries have worked to disrupt major events in the past or take advantage of geopolitical happenings, cybercriminals now have new tools at their disposal, particularly generative AI, to aid their efforts. Officials are already offering warnings about AI’s threat to the upcoming elections, talking about the role this technology will likely play in accelerating the spread of disinformation online. Attendees and viewers of the upcoming Paris games can expect to be bombarded with scams targeting fan loyalties. And as the games increasingly rely on technology to time, manage, and broadcast events, there is a growing likelihood that those systems may become targets.
But there are more opportunities for causing mayhem than just these significant events. While resource-constrained state and local governments have long been targets of cyberattacks, we predict that malicious actors will find new ways to infiltrate these entities as well. For example, cybercriminals could easily use ML and AI to regionalize attacks, translating associated communications to local languages using large-language models.
Narrowing the TTP playing field
We anticipate that attackers will inevitably continue to expand the collection of TTPs they use to compromise their targets. Yet by narrowing the playing field and finding ways to disrupt those activities, defenders can gain an advantage.While most of the day-to-day work done by cybersecurity defenders is related to blocking indicators of compromise, there’s great value in taking a closer look at the TTPs attackers regularly use to improve their playbooks and find points at which we
can disrupt their attack models. While attackers may have a broad toolkit for executing ransomware or phishing campaigns, their techniques are often similar. As defenders, we can map what attackers are doing, share that intelligence among the security community, and mitigate specific techniques.
The Attack Flow Project, led by the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense in collaboration with several partners, including Fortinet, offers security practitioners the chance to narrow the TTP playing field. Project contributors are creating a data model designed to help the security community find choke points on the chessboard by documenting the steps a malicious actor takes as part of an attack. As cybercriminals advance their operations and become more adept at evading traditional detection measures, identifying where we can potentially disrupt their activities will become even more vital.