14 Top Cybersecurity Trends To Expect At Black Hat Conference

Hitting Up Both Vendors And Customers For Ransom

Ransomware has evolved from locking down a single device or server to debilitating an entire organization by inflicting widespread damage, said Tim Choi, Proofpoint’s vice president of product marketing. This can result in a disruption of service for employees, customers and members of the impacted organization’s supply chain, according to Choi.

Adversaries are no longer content simply encrypting victims and denying them access to their systems and have over the past few years pushed to exfiltrate the data of victims and threaten to publicly release it, Choi said. More recently, hackers have capitalized on the supply chain to tell customers that a vendor of theirs was compromised and threaten to leak that customer’s data if a ransom isn’t paid.

Hackers have increased their telemetry across the channel so that if a campaign if successful, they have visibility into the victim’s web traffic and command and control servers, Choi said. Businesses should examine their legal and regulatory landscape and conduct tabletop exercises to ensure they don’t end up making an incorrect decision during an actual security incident since they ran out of time, Choi said.