Fortinet unveiled its predictions about the cyberthreat landscape for 2022 and beyond. Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances, FortiGuard Labs articulates, “Cybercriminals are evolving and becoming more like traditional APT groups; zero-day equipped, destructive, and able to expand their techniques as needed to achieve their goals.” He added, “We will see attacks spanning further outside of the extended network, even into space, as attackers take advantage of a fragmented perimeter, siloed teams and tools as well as a greatly expanded attack surface. These threats will leave overwhelmed IT teams scrambling to cover every possible avenue of attack.”

Following are the highlights of the prediction report made by FortiGuard Labs:

• Ransomware will get more destructive: There will continue to be a crimeware expansion and ransomware will remain a focus going forward. Ransomware attacks could be a concern for emerging edge environments, critical infrastructure, and supply chains.
• Cybercriminals use ai to master deep fakes: Cybercriminals are also leveraging AI to thwart the complicated algorithms used to detect their abnormal activity. Going forward, this will evolve as deep fakes become a growing concern because they leverage AI to mimic human activities and can be used to enhance social engineering attacks.
• More attacks against lesser targeted systems in the supply chain: In many networks, Linux runs many of the back-end computing systems, and until recently, it has not been a primary target of the cybercriminal community. Recently, new malicious binaries have been detected targeting Microsoft’s WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This further expands the attack surface into the core of the network and increases the threats that need to be defended in general. This has ramifications for operational technology (OT) devices and supply chains in general that run on Linux platforms.
• Cybercrime targets space: FortiGuard Labs expects to see new proof-of-concept (POC) threats targeting satellite networks over the next year as satellite-based internet access continues to grow. The biggest targets will be organizations that rely on satellite-based connectivity to support low-latency activities, such as online gaming or delivering critical services to remote locations, as well as remote field offices, pipelines, or cruises and airlines.
• Cybercriminals thrive living off the land at the edge: A new edge-based threat is emerging. Edge malware could monitor edge activities and data and then steal, hijack, or even ransom critical systems, applications, and information while avoiding being detected.