Over the past 12 months, the style and severity of APT threats has continued to evolve. Despite their constantly changing nature, there is a lot we can learn from recent APT trends to predict what might lie ahead in the coming year.
Based on the collective knowledge and insights of our experts, we have developed key predictions for where APTs are likely to strike next, and to help potential targets stay on their guard.
Let’s start by looking at the predictions we made for 2021.
APT threat actors will buy initial network access from cybercriminals
Last year, we foresaw the APT and cybercrime worlds becoming more porous on an operational level. In particular, we expected APT actors to leverage deep-web marketplaces where hackers sell access to the companies they have broken into. This prediction appears to have come true only a few days ago. Blackberry released a report centered around an entity they call Zebra 2104 and which appears to be an “initial access broker”. According to their research, Zebra 2014 has provided ransomware operators with an initial foothold into some of their victims. But more interestingly, it looks like the StrongPity APT has used their services as well, despite being focused entirely on intelligence collection. Due to the fact that this is the sort of activity that would take place during the preparation stages of an attack – stages that we typically have no visibility into, there may be more occurrences of such interactions between APTs and the cybercrime world that we’re unaware of.
More countries using legal indictments as part of their cyberstrategy
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