Cyberattacks - Weaponizing The Intelligent Edge

Fortinet has unveiled predictions about the threat landscape for 2021 and beyond. These predictions reveal strategies the team anticipates cybercriminals will employ in the near future, along with recommendations that will help defenders prepare to protect against these oncoming attacks.

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The Intelligent Edge - an Opportunity and a Target: Over the past few years, the traditional network perimeter has been replaced with multiple edge environments, WAN, multi-cloud, data center, remote worker, IoT, and more, each with its unique risks. One of the most significant advantages to cybercriminals in all of this is that while all of these edges are interconnected many organizations have sacrificed centralized visibility and unified control in favor of performance and digital transformation. As a result, cyber adversaries are looking to evolve their attacks by targeting these environments.

Trojans Evolve to Target the Edge: While end-users and their home resources are already targets for cybercriminals, sophisticated attackers will use these as a springboard into other things going forward. Corporate network attacks launched from a remote worker’s home network, especially when usage trends are clearly understood, can be carefully coordinated so they do not raise suspicions. Eventually, advanced malware could also discover even more valuable data and trends using new edge access trojans and perform invasive activities such as intercept requests off the local network to compromise additional systems or inject additional attack commands.