Cyberattacks keeping CISOs up at night vary by geography, as do strategies for protecting the business from compromise. In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, threat intelligence experts say evolutions in ransomware, long dwell time, and local nation-state actors are top of mind.
"I've seen a huge uptick in terms of the evolution of the ransomware threat space," says Steve D'sa, director of consulting for Mandiant, in a discussion of online attacks targeting Asia-Pacific organizations.
While attackers historically have targeted businesses purely for financial gain, he says they're now paying closer attention to which parts of the businesses they can access and the type of data they can steal. If a victim refuses to pay up, they can threaten to publish the information. The result is an evolution from "your business is not available" to a cyber extortion indicent.
This is a major fear at the executive level, D'sa continues, because there are more ramifications when sensitive corporate data goes public. It's prompting more conversation in the C-suite.
Driving executive concerns is a preference for big game hunting, adds Sherif El-Nabawi, vice president of sales engineering at CrowdStrike. Attackers are focusing on specific individuals versus broad campaigns, and they are "very successful" in doing so. They also request larger ransoms: Some groups, with bitcoin conversions, reached gains of $100 million.
"Ransomware-as-a-service has accelerated this," he says of the trend. "It meant there are more groups going into this field very quickly. It meant the escalation and speed of the actual attacks, and the success rates, are higher. With ransomware-as-a-service, attackers don't have to do the full attack li ..
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