Europol: Ransomware Will be Top Threat for Years

Europol: Ransomware Will be Top Threat for Years: Ransomware is now the biggest malware that continues to grow which is threat to businesses around the world, but the mobile threats and the crypto-jacking appears as the serious challenges, according to Europol.

The law enforcement organization’s annual Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) provides a clear blueprint of the current industry trends. It do reflected many findings of the security vendors: that the ransomware is for sure slowly but yet it is the most globally spread financially motivated threats out there, ahead of the banking Trojans — and that will be for several years more.

DDoS attacks were the only second malware in terms of the volume of 2017, as an infrastructure becomes more “accessible, low-cost and low-risk.”

Europol has also pointed out that the threats of crypto-jacking that should be taken on watch, as it offers the cyber-criminals a “regular, low risk revenue stream.” Mobile malware was also flagged.

“Mobile malware has not been extensively reported in the late 2017, but this has been identified as an anticipated future threat for the private and the public entities alike,” said the report.

Javvad Malik, the security advocate at AlienVault, said the report is a good validation of many of the trends security experts in the vendors and research and community are seeing.

“Collaboration that appears to be on the biggest and most prominent takeaways. Being able to establish the trustworthy channels to collaborate and share the information and intelligence is vital,” he continued.

“Notable by its omission, there is no mention of the role of the bots by organized crime and state to push agendas and misinformation, even though there are increasing industry studies that points to these as being tools in the arsenal of attackers.”