FortiGuard Labs On Evolving Threat Trends in Cybersecurity for 2016

Fortinet® global leader in high performance cybersecurity solutions – and its threat research division, FortiGuard Labs, have made their annual predictions of the most significant trends in malware and network security going into 2016 with their New Rules: The Evolving Threat Landscape in 2016 report revealing the new trends and strategies that FortiGuard researchers anticipate cyber criminals to arm their customers with the knowledge that they need to maintain their advantage in the cybersecurity arms race and proactively change the way all businesses look at their security strategies going into the new year.

The top cybersecurity trends for 2016 includes Increased M2M Attacks and Propagation Between Devices, Worms and Viruses Designed to Specifically Attack IoT Devices, Attacks On Cloud and Virtualized Infrastructure, New Techniques That Thwart Forensic Investigations and Hide Evidence of Attacks, Malware That Can Evade Even Advanced Sandboxing Technologies.

FortiGuard researchers anticipate that IoT will become central to “land and expand” attacks in which hackers will take advantage of vulnerabilities in connected consumer devices to get a foothold within the corporate networks and hardware to which they connect. They expect to see further development of exploits and malware that target trusted communication protocols between these devices. There will be a magnitude of damage from worms and viruses when they can propagate among millions or billions of devices from wearables to medical hardware.

There is also potential threat for malware to escape from a hypervisor and access the host operating system in a virtualized environment as exemplified by Venom vulnerability. With growing reliance on virtualization and both private and hybrid clouds as well as with most many apps access cloud-based systems, cybercriminals will definitely target this for gain.

Rombertik garnered significant attention in 2015 as one of the first major pieces in the wild as a “blastware” designed to destroy or disable a system when it is detected. Another type is “ghostware” where it is designed to erase the indicators of compromise that security systems are designed to detect making it very difficult for organizations to track the extent of data loss associated with an attack.

Two-faced malware, though, behaves normally while under inspection but then delivers a malicious payload once it has been passed by the sandbox which can be challenging to detect but can also interfere with threat intelligence mechanisms that rely on sandbox rating systems.

Each of these trends represents a significant and novel challenge for both organizations deploying security solutions and for vendors developing them. Fortinet is on the cutting edge of threat research and network security, providing complete network protection from edge to endpoint, continuously updated by FortiGuard and the threat intelligence feeds from millions of devices deployed worldwide. 

As Derek Manky, global security strategist for Fortinet explained, “FortiGuard Labs was formed over a decade ago to monitor and detect the latest threats, zero days, and emerging malware to provide the best possible protection for our customers. We leverage our incredible visibility into the global threat landscape to develop actionable threat intelligence, allowing us to respond quickly to new threats.” 

Ken Xie, Fortinet founder and CEO, also noted that “As we look ahead at the threats associated with our increasing connectedness and the proliferation of new devices, Fortinet is committed to delivering uncompromising security and further enhancing our solutions to meet both the current and future needs of our customers.”