Cyber Threats to Your Money?
With Mandana Javaheri
The explosive growth of AI in 2023 has been accompanied by an increase in the volume and level of sophistication of cyber threats.
According to Microsoft, AI is helping cybercriminals create new types of malware and more elaborate phishing campaigns, in addition to the attackers becoming faster and more efficient.
The global cost of cybercrime is expected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.
Microsoft was the first company to market with an AI-based cybersecurity product, called Microsoft Security Copilot.
Mandana Javaheri, General Manager, Security Business, Microsoft Asia says businesses need to ramp up capabilities to deal with the ever-present threat.
“They're as smart as us, so we also need to be able to respond to it with advanced AI and generative AI technologies, which Microsoft is using, and a lot of other industry leaders are also advancing in that area.”
AI-based cyber solutions have been able to identify and deal with threats in minutes, rather than hours or days.
“The AI knows the context and finds the answer for you. And then it can also write you a script. This script can be run and can detect, for example, you can say, was there any phishing attack in my environment today? It can go and find whether there was a phishing attack and how did it start? If there was a phishing campaign, who clicked on that email? If somebody clicked on the email, was it a lateral movement?”
Big tech is investing significantly in cybersecurity to bolster their cloud dominance, in addition to cyber representing a new revenue stream.
In addition to AI, one of the key thematics underpinning the rapid surge in cyber threats is the shift to remote working.
According to Microsoft data, the number of attacks against remote management devices has increased sixfold since June 2021.
Javaheri says many companies don’t even know which devices are connected, or what level of access they’ve been granted.
“It's not about if you're going to get breached, but it's about when you're going to get breached. Things like multi-factor authentication, things like patching, making sure everything is up to date, and thinking of their framework for security from the zero trust perspective and zero trust principles, which is really bringing us back to basics of security.”
For businesses, as well as individuals, attacks on internet-facing devices is also a major risk.
For example, one of the largest attack surfaces on the consumer side is the Xbox.
“You have a smart TV, you have a smart controller for your air conditioner. You have a IoT of devices and the challenge is that they're not necessarily designed to be secure, patched and controlled remotely. So that's definitely a risk.”
In Microsoft’s Digital Defence Report 2022, it highlights the rise of “cybercrime-as-a-service” in which criminals are purchasing cybercrime software online.
Many are using the software to initiate ransomware attacks.
According to Microsoft, ransomware is one of the largest sources of illicitly gained cryptocurrency.
Using the cryptocurrency investigative tool Chainalysis, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit discovered the AcendEX hackers swapped their stolen funds at a smaller DEX called Curve in addition to Uniswap.
This diagram illustrates the laundering routes the team uncovered. Each circle represents a cluster of wallets and the numbers on each line represent the total amount of Ethereum transmitted for laundering purposes.
Javaheri says it's important for anyone holding digital assets to make sure they are stored in a cold wallet.
“We've seen an emergence of what's called cryware and cryware basically steals information from the non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet, which is also called hot wallet. So, the hot wallet actually is stored on your device, which means it makes it easier to get access to cryptographic keys which are needed for a transaction. So if the bad actor gets access to the hot wallet, that means they can easily move your money from your wallet to their own wallet.”
The good news is that with basic hygiene in place, 98% of cybercrimes can be thwarted.
Simple measures like strong passwords and two-factor authentication are a critical part of the fortress against cybercriminals.
In this context, the cyber challenge needs to be solved by people, process and technology.
It’s a growing industry with enormous growth potential, but equally an extraordinary risk for individuals and businesses that don’t put appropriate measures in place to thwart cybercriminals.
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