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MIT Technology Review Insights surveyed over 300 C-level executives, directors and managers worldwide between December 2020 and January 2021 to understand how they address present and future cyber-threats. Key findings include:

• The top 3 most concerning attacks were email attacks (74%), ransomware (73%) and cloud-based attacks (68%)
• 96% of respondents are preparing for the onset of AI attacks
• 68% expect AI to be used for impersonation and spear-phishing attacks
• 60% believe that human-driven responses fail to keep up with automated cyber-attacks

The report includes a case study from McLaren Racing, the Formula 1 giant, which uses Darktrace’s Autonomous Cyber AI to detect and respond to fast-moving cyber-attacks. The case study details an instance in which the AI stopped a sophisticated email impersonation attack during a busy race weekend.

The report also details insights from Darktrace’s Director of Threat Hunting and former White Hat Hacker, Max Heinemeyer, who explores the security challenges of ‘fearware’, highly targeted scam emails that have exploited the public’s fears around the pandemic.

“Of the individuals surveyed for this report, 60% are C-level executives and directors,” commented Laurel Ruma, Editorial Director, US at MIT Technology Review. “From the results, it is clear that cyber security is a real and significant issue for business leaders – and AI is going to play a very big part in securing all enterprises.”

“These findings show that we are at a watershed moment and business executives are preparing for a new era of attacks,” commented Nicole Eagan, Chief Strategy & AI Officer at Darktrace. “Approaches that are based on analyzing historical attacks will be ill-equipped to defend against Offensive AI. A fundamentally new approach using self-learning technology and autonomous response will be necessary to augment human security teams.”

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“Students during the pandemic are struggling with digital access, engagement and a severe sense of isolation. Cybersecurity should be the least of their concerns, and yet, it’s concerning to find that nearly half of educational institutions show a lack of preparedness,” said Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes. “It is essential that schools – and all organizations – stop viewing cybersecurity as an afterthought; protecting our students and their data online should be a top priority for educators.”

The report uncovered that cybersecurity preparation made a significant difference in a school’s ability to weather a cybersecurity event. For respondents who engaged in a variety of cybersecurity best practices before transitioning to a distance learning model, none suffered a cyberattack, and none cancelled a single day of distance learning because of a cyberattack.

18.2 percent of these more well-prepared respondents said “teachers or students have suffered a Zoom-bombing attack” compared to the 29.3 percent of all respondents.

In addition, the report revealed major inconsistencies in the perceived experiences between IT decision-makers and students. A remarkably low number of IT decision-makers said their schools suffered a cyberattack—just 2.7 percent—and yet, 46.2 percent of students said their schools suffered a cyberattack. This statistic of students experiencing a cyberattack is even more important as they look to enroll in universities or private schools because 61 percent of students reported that a cyberattack resulted in a significant or strong impact on their trust in their school.

Other key findings from the report include:

• 50.7 percent of IT decision-makers said that no one (not students, staff or faculty) was required to enroll in cybersecurity training before the new school year began
• 46.7 percent of IT decision-makers said their schools developed “no additional requirements” for the students, faculty, or staff who connected to the school’s network (no cybersecurity training AND no antivirus tool installations)
• Nearly three quarters (70.7 percent) of schools deployed new software needed for distance learning, such as Zoom, Remind, and Google Classroom
• In preparing for the new school year, 30.7 percent of schools admitted to not being able to provide for all teachers, administrators, and staff members to work remotely, while 45.3 percent of schools could not provide all the devices needed for every student to attain an equal quality of education
• With distance learning in full swing, concerns remain with device shortages:
  • 28 percent of IT respondents said their schools are missing laptops, computers or tablets for teachers
  • 40 percent are missing those tools for parents and students
  • 38.7 percent worry that teachers or students are too quickly using up the data on school-provided WiFi hotspots

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“As the industry’s only measure of BEC attack volume by industry, our quarterly BEC research is important for CISOs to prepare and stay ahead of attackers,” said Evan Reiser, CEO of Abnormal Security. “Not only are BEC campaigns continuing to increase overall, they are rising in 75% of industries that we track. Since these attacks are targeted and sophisticated, these increases could indicate an ability for threat actors to scale that may overwhelm some businesses.”

For this research, Abnormal Security tracked BEC campaigns across eight major industries, including Retail/Consumer Goods & Manufacturing, Technology, Energy/Infrastructure, Services, Medical, Media/TV, Finance and Hospitality. During Q3, Abnormal found that BEC campaign volume increased in six out of eight industries, with Energy/Infrastructure seeing the highest jump of 93% from Q2 to Q3. Retail/Consumer Goods & Manufacturing, Technology and Media received the highest volume of attacks during the quarter.

Among the numerous categories of attacks that Abnormal Security prevents for its Fortune 500 clients, it uniquely stops two types of BEC attacks: social engineering BEC, with a goal to impersonate internal employees and VIPs or external partners, and invoice and payment fraud BEC attacks, with a goal of stealing money from companies. During Q3, attackers continued to focus primarily on invoice and payment fraud, which increased 155% from Q2 to Q3. This trend was particularly notable in Retail/Consumer Goods & Manufacturing.

Threat actors continue to target invoice and payment fraud BEC attacks at finance departments, which increased by 54% on average per week from Q2 to Q3. In addition, attackers shifted tactics by increasing email attacks to group mailboxes by 212%.

Additional findings from Abnormal’s Q3 BEC research:

• While credential-phishing COVID-19 related attacks decreased by 82%, invoice and payment fraud that continues to leverage the fear, uncertainty and doubt of the pandemic increased by 81%.
• The most impersonated brands returned to the pre-pandemic “normal,” as Zoom dropped away from the top spot, replaced by DHL and followed by Dropbox and Amazon. Rounding out the top five were iCloud and LinkedIn.

The Abnormal Quarterly BEC Report for Q3 2020 report is now available for download.

Abnormal Security is a next-generation cloud email security company that protects organizations from advanced targeted attacks.

Image credit: Unsplash.

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Another drastic shift is related to the misconfiguration of cloud services: 88% of government agencies now say that cloud misconfiguration is a top security threat, while pre-pandemic, only 25% said it was critical. However, only 11% of incidents reported during the first three months of the pandemic were actually caused by this scenario.

In reality, most incidents during this time period involved the human factor: 53% of respondents said they experienced at least one phishing attack, and 18% reported insecure sharing of sensitive data. What’s particularly troubling is that improper data sharing was especially hard for government agencies to spot: nearly all organizations needed days (42%), weeks (32%) or even months (21%) to detect it.

“Government agencies should focus their cybersecurity efforts on mitigating the insider threat, especially when many employees and contractors are accessing the networks remotely. Organizations must ensure that every user understands basic cybersecurity rules and completes security training on a regular schedule. IT teams should look for solutions to speed threat detection and streamline incident investigation. In addition, they should follow proven security best practices like network segmentation, privilege attestation, continuous auditing for malicious activity across data repositories, and alerting on suspicious activity and changes,” said Ilia Sotnikov, VP of Product Management at Netwrix

Other findings discovered by the survey include:

• 29% of government agencies feel that they are at greater security risk now than they were before the pandemic. 86% of them are worried about stronger or more frequent cyberattacks, which is the highest percentage among all the verticals studied in the report.
• Concern about VPN exploitation grew from 10% pre-pandemic to 95% now.
• 26% of government agencies reported experiencing ransomware or other malware.
• 6% experienced data theft by employees. None was able to spot it in minutes and only 5% were able to flag the incident in hours. The rest (95%) required days, weeks or months.

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