Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cybersecurity leader, has revealed how it successfully blocked more than 10 million email threats, over 800,000 malicious URLs, and almost 4,500 malicious mobile apps targeted at Nigerian businesses and consumers between January and June 2023.
This comes at a time when the complexity of the country’s cybersecurity threat landscape continues to intensify.
These findings are detailed in the Trend Micro 2023 Midyear Cybersecurity Threat Report, which highlights the company’s telemetry, covering the broadest attack surface view across millions of commercial and consumer clients.
The report uncovers key trends in criminal techniques, tactics, and threat actor activity, providing essential guidance for defenders aiming to stay one step ahead of calculating cyber criminals.
Gareth Redelinghuys, Country Managing Director, African Cluster at Trend Micro, emphasised, “With each passing month, the local threat landscape becomes more intricate and convoluted.
Our latest research shows that malicious actors are shifting targets and becoming increasingly creative to be more efficient and prolific. Prioritising a set of proactive and holistic security solutions has never been more important.”
During the first half of 2023, Trend Micro blocked around 2.4 million malware families in Nigeria. Ransomware, in particular, poses a significant challenge for local companies, with hundreds of ransomware detections in June alone.
The Midyear Report offers valuable insight into the ways in which ransomware groups are operating—updating their tools and techniques to extract data more efficiently and adapting their business models.
Earlier this year, Trend Micro researchers discovered a new ransomware that utilises legitimate search engine tools to search for files to encrypt.
An investigation into this new ransomware, named ‘Mimic’ by researchers, suggests a connection with the larger and more notorious Conti ransomware group.
It is suspected that collaboration between these criminal groups helps them lower costs and increase their market presence while maintaining the efficacy of their criminal activities.
According to the report, many ransomware players are also redirecting their data exfiltration efforts towards tactics such as cryptocurrency theft and business email compromise (BEC).
Another key trend that emerged in the first half of 2023 was the use of AI by cybercriminals to carry out virtual crimes more efficiently.
A significant number of Nigerian businesses have implemented AI in some form to enhance their operations, but they aren’t the only ones.
Recently, malicious actors have abused AI technology to accurately impersonate real people as part of their attacks and scams. Imposter scams such as virtual kidnapping are becoming increasingly rampant globally.
In the case of virtual kidnapping, malicious actors create a fake voice of their victim’s child and use it as proof that they have the child in their possession to pressure the victim into sending large ransom amounts.
At the same time, ChatGPT and other AI tools enable criminals to automate the gathering of information, formation of target groups, and identification of vulnerable behaviours. This helps them lure big-name victims (also known as “big fish”) into harpoon whaling attacks.
Whaling involves tricking executives and directors through phishing campaigns for the purpose of stealing information or syphoning large sums of money.
Harpoon whaling, on the other hand, involves extensive research on targeted individuals. This attack is a highly targeted social engineering scam that involves emails crafted with a sense of urgency that contain personalised information about the targeted executive or director.
With AI tools becoming increasingly adept at creating text that can seem human-crafted, the effort needed to attack executives has been drastically reduced, making the targeting of hundreds of thousands of executives easier than ever before.
As innovations continue to evolve and involve more data, threat actors have also found more ways to victimise people.
For example, today’s connected cars contain over 100 million lines of code, providing smart functionality to users but also opening doors to hackers.
As more smart cars saturate the market, attackers will attempt to gain access to user account data and leverage it for crimes.
By hijacking or stealing such an account via phishing for credentials or installing malware, a cybercriminal could locate the car, break into it, and potentially sell it for parts or follow-on crimes.
They might even be able to locate the owner’s home address and target it for burglary when they’re not there.
Threat actors have also been casting a wider net by leveraging vulnerabilities in smaller platforms for more specific targets, such as file transfer service MOVEit, business communications software 3CX, and print management software solution PaperCut.
“The increasingly sophisticated tactics being employed by hackers present a particular concern for local businesses, which face untold potential damages at the hands of these malicious actors,” says Zaheer Ebrahim, Solutions Architect, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro.
“It’s critical for defenders to gain a thorough understanding of the potential risks they are facing. Knowing these threats will help them make more informed decisions and ultimately take proactive measures to stay ahead in the increasingly convoluted cat-and-mouse game of cybersecurity.”
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro’s cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organisations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.
As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, the platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defence techniques optimised for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google and central visibility for better, faster detection and response.
With 7,000 employees across 65 countries, Trend Micro enables organisations to simplify and secure their connected world.
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