LATEST INTELLIGENCE
M-TRENDS 2021
eExpanding knowledge by sharing intrusion realities
Security practitioners faced a series of challenges in this past year which forced organisations into uncharted waters . As ransomware operators were attacking state and municipal networks alongside hospitals and schools , a global pandemic response to COVID-19 necessitated a move to remote work for a significant portion of the economy . Organisations had to adopt new technologies and quickly scale outside of their normal growth plans .
As organisations settled into a new understanding of “ normal ,” UNC2452 , a suspected nation-state threat actor , conducted one of the most advanced cyber espionage campaigns in recent history . Many security teams were forced to suspend wide-ranging analyses around the adoption of remote work policies and instead focus on a supply chain attack from a trusted platform .
Themes covered in M-Trends 2021 include :
• 59 % of the security incidents investigated by Mandiant last year were initially detected by the organisations themselves , an improvement of 12 % from the prior year
• Ransomware has evolved into multifaceted extortion where actors not only deploy ransomware encryptors across victim environments , but also employ a variety of other extortion tactics to coerce victims into complying with demands
• FIN11 , a recently named financially motivated threat group , was responsible for widespread phishing campaigns , that conducted several multifaceted extortion operations
• Pervasive ransomware campaigns drove down the median dwell time as threat actors sought to capitalise on shifting trends in the workspace and a global crisis . p
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Nation states taking a cyber espionage approach to COVID research , threat groups working together to achieve their objectives , exploitation of quickly adopted work from home strategies and a wake-up call for global supply chain compromise – experiences in 2020 will shape security policies for years to come .
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