By ADEDEJI ADEYEMI FAKOREDE
KASPERSKY Lab’s experts have predicted that there will be many attacks aimed at getting the financial and personal data of Nigerian users of Personal Computers and mobile phones this year.
Many Nigerian companies may also see their data stolen by cyber thieves, said Dirk Kollberg, Senior Security Researcher, Global Research & Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab.
“Nigerians companies are now choosing to keep their data in the cloud due to the reduced costs and the grown Internet speed, so the opportunity for malware writers to steal company data has become a much bigger risk than a few years ago”, said Kollberg when revealing the 2016 predictions of Kaspersky.
The firm’s experts also anticipated that in 2016 users of Information and Communication Technology will see significant evolution in cyber espionage trade craft.
First, they said, there would be a dramatic change in how APTs are structured and operated.”It is expected to see a decreased emphasis on ‘persistence’, with a greater focus on memory-resident or fileless malware, reducing the traces left on an infected system and thereby avoiding detection”, the experts said in their predictions for 2016 which are based on the expertise of the Global Research and Analysis.
Furthermore, the experts see that there is less urge to demonstrate superior cyber-skills, so return on investment will rule much of the nation-state attacker’s decision-making.
Therefore there will be an increase in the repurposing of off-the-shelf malware rather than investment in bootkits, rootkits and custom malware that gets burned by research teams.
Consumer threats will also evolve, according to expert. “Ransomware will be gaining more ground on banking Trojans and is expected to extend into new areas such as OS X devices, often owned by wealthier and therefore more lucrative targets in addition to mobile and the Internet-of-Things”, they added.
Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to make their victims pay.
Therefore, alternative payment systems such as ApplePay and AndroidPay, as well as stock exchanges are expected to become growing targets for financial cyber-attacks.