Wearables, Routers And Social Media Will Be Targeted By New Breed Of UK Hackers

UK businesses will be hit by more targeted attacks launched by homegrown cyber criminals in 2015 with wearables, routers and social media all in the crosshairs of a new breed of hackers.

The “Trend Micro Security Predictions for 2015 and Beyond: The Invisible Becomes Visible” report casts the assertion that targeted attacks will happen as often as regular cybercrime attacks next year and come from countries other than China, the US and Russia.

“Following the success of targeted attacks from Chinese and Russian cybercriminals, many hackers from other countries will regard cyber-attacks as a more practical method to grab a foothold in an organization. Additionally, with the incessant barrage of data breaches emerging almost daily, it’s reasonable to presume that data breaches will be essentially regarded as a common offshoot of the present threat landscape,” said Raimund Genes, CTO, Trend Micro.

Researchers at Trend Micro made a big play of the amount of new attacks that it expects to see against Apple Pay and other NFC-enabled mobile payments systems since Apple implemented the technology last month.

“The payment ecosystem will continue to evolve,” said JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions, Trend Micro. “Massive transformation is upon us and we will continue to see threat actors trying to manipulate NFC as certain platforms gain momentum due to their significant following and user’s penchant for adopting the latest and greatest technology.”

The Internet of Everything isn’t expected to be targeted by mass attacks due to the “diversity of technology” on offer, however, Trend Micro did add that the data being processed by the devices is ripe for exploitation.

When it comes to mobile devices, Trend Micro expects there to be an Android-specific exploit kit that is able to use the platform’s widespread fragmentation to its advantage. Hackers are likely to automate the exploitation of mobile bugs across platforms using cross-platform interaction and it means that plugging a device into a computer increases the risk of infection.

Trend Micro also thinks that cybercriminals will flock to the dark net and exclusive-access forums to share crimeware and sell it to each other, and increases in cyber activity will mean hacking tools that are bigger, better and more successful. 

It also expects to see a proliferation of attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in open source apps and lastly increasingly severe online banking and financially motivated attacks will emerge.