Chennai: Cybersecurity experts at Avast, foresee more Covid-19 vaccination scams, abuse of weak home office infrastructures, enterprise VPN infrastructure and providers, and ransomware attacks in 2021.In a press release here, Avast said it also expects deepfake disinformation campaigns and other malicious AI-generated campaigns to gain more traction. Specifically, on the Android platform, Avast experts predict further adware attacks, fleeceware scams, and stalkerware usage.
This year, a number of healthcare institutions in the US, Europe, and Asia were attacked by ransomware, stealing data that in some cases were leaked to the public.
As many employees will continue to work from home in 2021, there is a high likelihood that cyber attacks on enterprise VPN infrastructure and providers will continue, with the goal of infiltrating business networks with targeted attacks designed to spy on confidential information and steal intellectual property and customer data.
‘We expect to see a continuation of ransomware attacks on healthcare institutions and the exfiltration of sensitive data, with attacks specifically targeting pharmaceutical companies and institutions to harvest sensitive customer information for blackmailing and industry espionage’, said Jakub Kroustek, Threat Labs Team lead at Avast.
‘The pandemic, the resulting increase in people working from home, and higher reliance on online connectivity as well as the growing economic pressure, combined with uncertainty among people, are likely to feed into the effectiveness of the use of deepfakes to spread disinformation’, said Petr Somol, AI Research director at Avast.
‘The cybersecurity industry has continued to raise awareness around the issue of stalkerware in 2020 which may help prevent further growth in stalkerware attacks at the end of this year and in 2021 as the authors and operators may be waiting for the hype to die down before they can drive new campaigns. The primary modus operandi for this category of threat is, after all, stealth. There will, however, always be a loyal user base in the stalkerware field’, said Ondrej David, Mobile Malware Analysis Team leader at Avast.