Cybercriminal Tactics to Change in 2021 to Target Corporate Networks

Cybercriminal tactics in 2021 will shift in new and innovative ways to attack individuals, their homes and devices to find a path to corporate networks.

That’s according to WatchGuard Technologies‘ security predictions for next year. The global pandemic has rapidly accelerated the existing shift toward remote work. Employees now operate beyond the protection of the corporate firewall. In turn, cybercriminal tactics will exploit these vulnerabilities.

WatchGuard’s Corey Nachreiner

Corey Nachreiner is WatchGuard’s CTO. He said security service providers were already preparing for many of the new challenges and opportunities. But 2020 has dramatically accelerated the trends.

“One obvious example is remote work,” he said. “Remote work is likely to be the norm, even post-pandemic. With most employees working outside an organization’s direct network purview, you need to adjust the security stack accordingly. For an attacker, how they target victims changes when the user isn’t protected by traditional corporate technologies. Security practitioners already have security controls to handle both scenarios, but they’ll likely have to rebalance which they focus on.”

The cloud, whether SaaS or IaaS/PaaS, isn’t new, Nachreiner said. But many organizations and service providers still have less experience securing cloud data when they’re somewhat limited by what’s allowed by third-party providers.

“There are many technologies and best practices that can indeed help an organization secure cloud resources,” he said. “But the industry still seems less familiar with them, and their value. There will be a lot of opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs that can help customers lock down their cloud data.”

People and Emotions

Automation will drive a new tidal wave of spear phishing campaigns, according to WatchGuard.

“Cybercriminals have already started to create tools that can automate the manual aspects of spear phishing,” Nachreiner said. “By combining such tools with programs that scan data from social media networks and company websites, phishers can send thousands of detailed, believable spear-phishing emails, with content customized to each victim. This will dramatically increase the volume of spear phishing emails attackers can send at once, which will improve their success rate. On the bright side, these automated, volumetric spear-phishing campaigns will likely be less sophisticated and easier to spot than the traditional, manually generated variety.”

Bad actors know anxiety and uncertainty make victims easier to exploit, he said. As society continues to grapple with COVID-19, global political strife and general financial insecurity in 2021, these automated spear-phishing attacks will prey on fears around the pandemic, politics and the economy.

Stealing Credentials

In addition, threat actors now have an abundance of tools to help them craft convincing spear-phishing emails that trick victims into giving up credentials or installing malware. They’re leveraging cloud hosting to piggyback on the otherwise good reputation of internet giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

“Most cloud-hosting services like Azure and AWS offer internet-accessible data storage where users can upload anything they’d like, from database backups to individual files and more,” Nachreiner said. “These services are exposed to the internet through custom subdomains or URL paths on prominent domains such as cloudfront.net, windows.net and googleapis.com. Threat actors commonly abuse these features to host website HTML files designed to mimic the authentication form of a legitimate website like Microsoft365 or Google Drive, and to steal credentials submitted by unsuspecting victims.”

WatchGuard predicts these cloud-hosting providers next year will begin heavily cracking down on phishing and other scams. They’ll do so by deploying automated tools and file validation that spot spoofed authentication portals.

Hitting Home

With work from home continuing through 2021 and beyond, cybercriminals will change their approach and create attacks specifically targeting the home worker.

“Malicious hackers often include worm functionality modules in their malware, designed to move laterally to other devices on a network,” Nachreiner said. “In 2021, cybercriminals will exploit under-protected home networks as an avenue to access valuable corporate endpoint devices. By deliberately seeking out and infecting the company-owned laptops and smart devices on our home networks, attackers could ultimately compromise corporate networks. Next year, we expect to see malware that not only spreads across networks, but looks for signs that an infected device is for corporate use (such as evidence of VPN usage).”

Smart Cars Targeted

In addition, smart cars keep getting smarter and more common, with more manufacturers releasing new models every year. Security researchers and black hat hackers alike are paying attention. In 2021, WatchGuard expects a surge in smart car attacks that leverage smart chargers.

“As with chargers for our mobile phones and other connected devices, smart car charging cables carry more than just energy,” Nachreiner said. “Although they don’t transfer data in the same way phone chargers do, smart car chargers do have a data component that helps them…