E-Business
New Research from Trend Micro Shows Cyberattacks Relied on Substance Over Size in 2023
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cybersecurity leader, has revealed that it blocked around 18 million email threats, almost two million malicious URLs and over four million malicious mobile apps targeted at Nigerian businesses and consumers between January and December 2023. This as threat actors deviate from big-batch attacks to focus on a narrower range of more lucrative targets.
These new patterns in the cybercrime landscape are highlighted in the Trend Micro 2023 Annual Cybersecurity Report, which presents highlights from the company’s telemetry covering the broadest attack surface view across millions of commercial and consumer clients.
“Our latest data shows that threat actors are fine-tuning their operations, shifting away from large-scale attacks, and instead focusing on a smaller range of targets but with higher victim profiles for maximum gain with minimum effort. As they continue to double down on tried and tested techniques, they are also delegating and streamlining operations — resulting in bolder, more effective strikes,” says Gareth Redelinghuys, Country Managing Director, African Cluster at Trend Micro.
Attacks focused on substance over quantity are more difficult to block
Though thousands of ransomware attacks were blocked by Trend Micro in Nigeria in 2023, year-on-year research shows that ransomware groups are working smarter instead of harder, prioritising high-value targets over volume.
There has been a general downward trend in ransomware detections, with worldwide detections from 2021 to 2023 averaging less than half of the recorded detections in 2020; however, this should not be misconstrued as a cue for security operations centres and decision-makers to lower their guards. Historically, ransomware attacks were launched in “bulk,” such as spam campaigns with malicious links, but attacks that focus on quantity can more easily be blocked.
What’s more, a continued increase in Trojan FRS threat detections globally could suggest that attackers are using more effective ways to evade preliminary detection by focusing on arrival and defense evasion techniques. Examples of this include Living-Off-The-Land Binaries and Scripts. Because these computer files are non-malicious in nature and local to the operating system, they can be used by threat actors to camouflage their attacks.
Last year, several ransomware families across the world were also observed maximising remote and intermittent encryption, as well as abusing unmonitored virtual machines to bypass Endpoint Detection and Response. Because there is less content used during intermittent encryption, for example, there is less chance of triggering detection.
Gangs are also launching bolder attacks: Prolific groups were some of the most active in 2023: Clop exploited major vulnerabilities, and BlackCat launched a new variant, while also making its extortion public by leveraging the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s four-day disclosure requirement to incentivise its victim to communicate more quickly with them.
Email threats – attackers are using more sophisticated ways to avoid detection
This trend towards threat actors opting for quality over quantity is equally present in the patterns observed around email threats. Though email threat detections in Nigeria decreased from more than 45 million in 2021 to 18 million in 2023, the increase in malware detection count over the same period suggests a shift in the threat landscape that finds attackers making use of more sophisticated ways to avoid detection.
Trend Micro’s data also shows a slight decrease in malicious URL detection in Nigeria from 2021 to 2023, indicating that instead of focusing on malicious links to randomly victimise users, criminals are using more targeted operations, such as BEC schemes, where emails are less likely to undergo scrutiny because of how legitimate they look.
Instead of launching attacks on a wider range of users and relying on victims clicking on malicious links in websites and emails, more sophisticated attacks are launched using specificity to trick a narrower field of high-profile victims. This also allows them to bypass early detection layers like network and email filters.
AI-powered phishing attempts are more convincing than ever
Over the course of 2023, AI showed great promise in social engineering attempts globally: its automation proved most useful in mining datasets for actionable information, while generative AI have made phishing on mass scale virtually effortless with error-free and convincing messages. The use of generative AI in phishing attempts is already branching beyond emails and texts to include persuasive audio and video ‘deepfakes’ for an even more business-affecting threat.
Imagine a company that requires live voice authorisation for purchases above a million dollars, for example. An attacker could send a real-seeming email request with a rigged phone number embedded and answer the confirmation call with a deepfaked voice to validate the transaction. These new tactics introduce the possibility of everything from stock market manipulations to democratic or wartime disinformation campaigns, or smear attacks on public figures.
The barriers to entry for techniques like these have fallen away radically with the rise of readily available app-style interfaces like HeyGen. Cybercriminals with no coding knowledge or special computing resources can produce customised high-resolution outputs that are humanly undetectable.
“Looking at the overall trend in decreasing ransomware threats, it might be tempting for local organisations to develop a false sense of security and lower their defenses. However, our research shows that these increasingly sophisticated attacks are going to become more and more difficult for businesses to detect and that they will be increasingly costly when they succeed. IT leaders must refine their processes and protocols to enable their defenses to combat persistence with efficiency,” concludes Zaheer Ebrahim, Solutions Architect, Middle East and Africa at Trend Micro.
What’s a surefire way of frustrating your customers, hindering business efficiency and losing massive revenue?
Delayed payment notifications.
With technological advancement, customers expect real-time payment processing. However, delays in payment notifications can significantly damage the customer experience and further strain your business’s operational efficiency.
The importance of efficient payment processing has further increased with the rise of digital payments, making it critical for businesses to prioritise real-time payment updates. Payment solutions like SeerBit’s Virtual Accounts offer a way for businesses to overcome these challenges, ensuring smooth, prompt transactions.
In this blog post, we discuss the various ways in which our virtual accounts solution can help your business deal with delayed payment notifications once and for all.
Why Delayed Payment Notifications Frustrate Your Customers?
Delayed payment notifications are more than just technical issues; they cause significant frustration for customers. When customers make a payment, they expect confirmation almost immediately. Any delay can lead to confusion. Was this a successful transaction or was there an unfortunate glitch? What are the consequences for your business?
- Customer dissatisfaction: Studies show that 41% of customers abandon a business after a poor payment experience, with delayed notifications often a key contributor to this frustration.
- Reduced customer loyalty: Customers may seek alternatives if they consistently encounter delayed notifications, as they prefer businesses that offer seamless and transparent transactions.
The ripple effect of the uncertainty due to delayed payment notification is that frustrated customers may never return to your business. Nearly 70% of consumers report that real-time transaction updates significantly influence their decision to remain loyal to a business.
Delayed Payment Notifications and Their Impact on Business Efficiency
Beyond the immediate customer frustration, delayed payment notifications can have a ripple effect on overall business efficiency. These delays can disrupt internal operations in several ways:
- Cash flow management disruption: Businesses rely on accurate and timely payment data for cash flow management. Delays in notifications can complicate the ability to track revenue in real-time, making financial planning challenging.
- Increased operational burden: Delayed notifications force businesses to allocate more resources to manual reconciliation, leading to increased labour costs. A recent report highlights that businesses spend up to 40% more time managing payment discrepancies when notifications are delayed.
- Delayed fulfilment and customer service: Without immediate confirmation, businesses may delay product or service fulfilment, causing further frustration. The resulting slowdown in operations can severely impact customer retention and brand reputation.
For businesses that rely on seamless operations, delayed payment notifications also hurt operational efficiency. Any lag in financial data can result in missed opportunities, delayed orders, or failure to meet service level agreements (SLAs). When these inefficiencies become habitual, businesses risk damaging their reputation and ultimately losing customers to competitors who offer smoother, faster payment experiences.
So How Can Businesses Stop Losing Customers & Revenue to Delayed Payment Notifications?
Businesses must implement payment systems that guarantee real-time notifications. With SeerBit Virtual Accounts, businesses can leverage this solution to track transactions with real-time insights, thereby eliminating issues caused by delayed payment notifications. This ensures that you have:
- Instant Reconciliation: Virtual Accounts offer automated real-time reconciliation, which reduces the need for manual intervention and prevents delays in verifying transactions.
- Enhanced Transparency and Control: With prompt notifications, businesses can keep track of their incoming payments more efficiently, allowing them to make quicker financial decisions and avoid operational bottlenecks.
- Seamless Integration: SeerBit’s Virtual Accounts integrate smoothly into existing financial systems, minimising the technical hurdles businesses face when upgrading their payment infrastructure.
Benefits of Prompt Payment Notifications
SeerBit’s Virtual Accounts provide businesses with a solution designed to streamline payment processes and enhance overall operational efficiency. Key benefits include:
- Improved customer satisfaction: With real-time payment notifications, businesses can ensure that customers receive immediate confirmations, improving their experience and loyalty.
- Optimised business operations: Eliminating delays in payment processing, businesses can improve cash flow management, reduce reconciliation times, and streamline order fulfillment processes.
- Cost efficiency: A SeerBit Virtual Account reduces the need for manual reconciliation and prevents revenue loss due to customer churn, ultimately saving businesses time and money.
In an era where real-time efficiency defines competitive advantage, SeerBit’s Virtual Accounts help businesses stay ahead by delivering the timely payment notifications that both customers and businesses need.
Conclusion
Delayed payment notifications pose a serious threat to business efficiency and customer satisfaction. With the risk of lost revenue, disrupted operations, and frustrated customers, businesses cannot afford to overlook the importance of real-time payment solutions. SeerBit’s Virtual Accounts provide a seamless solution, empowering businesses with instant payment updates, improving financial transparency and enhancing operational efficiency.
By adopting Virtual Accounts, businesses can ensure they remain efficient, competitive and trusted by their customers.
In its continuous drive to help businesses in West Africa move away from the usually slow, labour-intensive and erroneous traditional network service provision, replacing it with an optimized network infrastructure, TD Africa has launched its Managed Service Providers (MSP) service.
The service provision authorisation which provides a more efficient, scalable and secure approach for network optimization, was granted by Huawei at the recent Huawei Connect 2024 event in South Africa.
With Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) technology, network deployment is now a matter of minutes rather than days. This technology not only accelerates time-to-market, but also reduces operational costs by up to 40 percent.
By virtue of these intelligent monitoring and analytics capabilities, TD Africa is able to provide a proactive fault identification and management solution, ensuring that network issues are resolved before they impact business operations.
The MSP uses Huawei iMaster-NCE technology which rides on a one-stop single-pane management solution for both traditional campus networks and SD-WAN.
While the MSP also offers enhanced security measures to safeguard data and infrastructure from cyber threats, the platform’s scalability allows businesses to easily adapt to changing needs and growth, making sure that the network infrastructure remains agile and responsive.
TD Africa (MSP) caters to Huawei, Cisco, Dlink, and other network infrastructure businesses. It can manage up to 65,000 network equipment concurrently, providing businesses with an intelligent solution for their networking needs.
“We are thrilled to introduce these innovative network services to the West African market,” said Mezie Emelonye, Head of TD Services at TD Africa.
“As the newly appointed authorised service centre for Huawei in the region, we are committed to providing our clients with the highest quality technology solutions and exceptional service.
“Our cloud-based services offer a significant leap forward in terms of speed, efficiency, and security, and we are confident that they will become the standard for network infrastructure in West Africa.”
TD Africa’s cloud-based network services are available to businesses of all sizes across West Africa.
For more information, visit [email protected].
Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, today released a sector survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2024,” which revealed that the rate of ransomware attacks against healthcare organizations has reached a four-year high since 2021. Of those organizations surveyed, two-thirds (67%) were impacted by ransomware attacks in the past year, up from 60% in 2023.
The rising rate of ransomware attacks against healthcare institutions contrasts with the declining rate of ransomware attacks across sectors; the overall rate of ransomware attacks fell from 66% in 2023 to 59% in 2024.
Alongside an increase in the rate of ransomware attacks, the healthcare sector reported increasingly longer recovery times. Only 22% of ransomware victims fully recovered in a week or less, a considerable drop from the 47% reported in 2023 and 54% in 2022.
In addition, 37% took more than a month to recover, up from 28% in 2023, reflecting the increased severity and complexity of attacks.
“While we’ve seen the rate of ransomware attacks reach a kind of “homeostasis” or even declining across industries, attacks against healthcare organizations continue to intensify, both in number and scope.
“The highly sensitive nature of healthcare information and need for accessibility will always place a bullseye on the healthcare industry from cybercriminals.
“Unfortunately, cybercriminals have learned that few healthcare organizations are prepared to respond to these attacks, demonstrated by increasingly longer recovery times.
“These attacks can have immense ripple effects, as we’ve seen this year with major ransomware attacks impacting the healthcare industry and impacting patient care,” said John Shier, field CTO, Sophos.
“To combat these determined adversaries, healthcare organizations must adopt a more proactive, human-led approach to threat detection and response, combining advanced technology with continuous monitoring to stay ahead of attackers.”
Additional findings from the report include:
· Ransom Recovery Costs Surge: The mean cost of recovery in a healthcare ransomware attack was $2.57 million in 2024, up from $2.2 million in 2023 and double the 2021 cost
· Ransom Demands vs Payments: 57% of healthcare institutions that paid the ransom ended up paying more than the original demand
· Root Cause of Attack: Compromised credentials and exploited vulnerabilities were tied for the number one root cause of attack, each accounting for 34% of attacks
· Backups Targeted: 95% of healthcare organizations hit by ransomware in the past year said that cybercriminals attempted to compromise their backups during the attack.
· Increased Pressure: Organizations whose backups were compromised were more than twice as likely to pay the ransom to recover encrypted data (63% vs. 27%)
· Who Pays the Ransom: Insurance providers are heavily involved in ransom payments, contributing in 77% of cases. 19% of total ransom payment funding comes from insurance providers.
The latest Sophos report on real-world ransomware experiences explores the full victim journey, from attack rate and root cause to operational impact and business outcomes, of 402 healthcare organizations.
The results for this sector survey report are part of a broader, vendor-agnostic survey of 5,000 cybersecurity/IT leaders conducted between January and February 2024 across 14 countries and 15 industry sectors.
Learn More About Ransomware
- Turning the screws: The pressure tactics of ransomware gangs
- The State of Ransomware 2024
- The effect of cyber insurance on the ransomware landscape
- The role of law enforcement in ransomware attacks
- The role of unpatched vulnerabilities in ransomware attacks
- How often companies’ backupsare compromised during ransomware attacks
- The rise of remote encryption among ransomware groups
- Ransomware attackers targeting managed service providers (MSPs) in the 2024 Sophos Threat Report: Cybercrime on Main Street
- The latest techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) of cyber attackers in the Active Adversary Report for 1H 2024
- The evolving ransomware business model in Junk Gun’ Ransomware: Peashooters Can Still Pack a Punch
- Sophos X-Ops and its groundbreaking threat research by subscribing to the Sophos X-Ops blogs
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