- Deepfakes and critical infrastructure attacks are top concerns in Blackberry’s Global Threat Intelligence Report
- 600,000 attacks were launched against critical infrastructure between July and September 2024
- 45% of these were against financial institutions
Critical infrastructure attacks continue to dominate the cybersecurity conversation, with Blackberry’s Global Threat Intelligence Report revealing that nearly 600,000 attacks were attributed to critical infrastructure attacks between July-September 2024.
The financial sector continues to face a massive volume of cyber-attacks that can bring it to its knees, being the target of 45% of these attacks, with healthcare organizations close behind at 30% of incidents, followed by 17% for public services. Downtime is expensive for these sectors, making them more likely to pay a ransom to quickly restore systems – making them an attractive target.
The rise of AI has inevitably led to an increase in cyber attacks, but also in the particularly predictable rise in deepfake fraud. These scams use an AI-generated image, video or voice to impersonate an executive or to infiltrate businesses. This is expected to lead to a staggering loss of $40 billion by 2027, highlighting it as a growing threat.
Deepfakes erode trust and pose an unprecedented challenge to stakeholders who can no longer be 100% sure of the authenticity of management communications.
This has outlined the dire need for deeply fraudulent regulatory frameworks such as the new US No Fraud AI Act and Canadian non-consensual media legislation.
Unsurprisingly, ransomware groups are also shaping the threat landscape, with notorious groups such as LockBit and ALPHV proving to be ‘silent but deadly’ by avoiding detection.
“Our attack surface has never been wider, with threat actors and nation-states expanding their horizons for cyberespionage attacks, while ransomware groups are becoming more sophisticated in their campaigns,” said Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Threat Research & Intelligence at BlackBerry.
“However, we have never been better prepared either. We have the tools, technology and protocols to protect ourselves and mitigate the impact of attacks, and our industry is poised to keep pace with changes in threat actor methodology.”
