Economic crime, misinformation and espionage, main tendencies of cyber-attacks in 2018

• This year S2 Group expects more complex attacks which will be part of better targeted operations that could potentially affect a greater number of victims due to their secrecy.
• Experts from the company's Malware Lab have pointed out that an increase in ransomware attacks with worm capabilities is expected, as well as the creation of botnets for rent.

Valencia, January 17, 2018.- The S2 Grupo company, specialized in cybersecurity and critical systems management, has warned that in 2018 the trend in cybercrime will be determined mainly by economic and political motivations. An increase is also expected in the complexity of attacks, in order to extract more benefit and affect the largest number of systems in a single blow. "In 2017 we experienced a particularly complicated year from the point of view of cybersecurity due to the large cyber-attacks that compromised and affected states, governments, large and small companies or public entities. The trend in 2018 is that cybercrime will continue to increase. This makes it essential to cyber-protect all environments in a comprehensive manner and that cybersecurity becomes one of the fundamental axes to ensure privacy and protection of any area whether political, business, public or private", said José Rosell, associate-director of S2 Grupo. In this regard, experts from the company's Malware Lab have pointed out that the forecast for this year in the field of cybersecurity is an increase in attacks aimed at obtaining an economic profit from a fraud to the CEO or a ransomware, for example. In addition, in the case of a ransomware an increase in viruses with worm capabilities is estimated, which causes a compromised system to automatically infect other environments. Along with this, we also expect a greater number of cybercrimes related to disinformation campaigns by large entities such as states or frontline organizations to influence the decision making of third parties. For example, mass campaigns of other countries in social networks during electoral processes as supposedly happened with the involvement of Russia in "el Procés". Another of the cybercrimes that is expected to increase in 2018 is cyber-espionage. The motivation behind this continues to be economic, political or industrial, mainly, but it is expected that its complexity will increase due to the use of better tools, techniques, tactics and procedures. In short, more complex attacks that will be part of better directed operations and that can potentially affect a greater number of victims by stealth. Finally, the team of experts of S2 Grupo has stressed that due to the continuous increase of the devices connected to the network, an increase of cyber-attacks to IoT devices is foreseeable this year. In this line, it is intuited that these attacks will be carried out mainly in industrial environments, medical environments, domotic environments and in the so-called Customer Technology. The objective in this area will again be mostly economic and it is expected to be developed through ransomware attacks, creation of botnets for rent, etc. More information: prensa@s2grupo.es