In its annual Digital Defense Report, Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) has expressed concern about the increase in cyber attacks, with the organization's customers being attacked up to 600 million times per day. The assessment for the period July 2023 to June 2024 shows how cyber activities are increasingly linked to international relations and geopolitics.
The growth of cybercrime gang affiliation with nation-states is emerging as a troubling development within the cybersecurity environment. As the report has it, these actors are not only borrowing strategies but are now more integrated to challenge supply systems and promote geopolitics. For example, Russian actors have been to farm out cyber spying operations against Ukraine, and Iran has relied on ransomware in cyber-influence campaigns against Israel.
North Korea‘s entry into the ransomware domain ought to be incredibly worrisome. The new ransomware of the regime called ‘FakePenny' was employed in the extortion attacks on aerospace and defense firms after data leaked, implying a high civil cyber war.
Cyber threats that will be targeted in the upcoming election for the white house seat have already been observed from Russia, Iran, and China in their bid to exploit political differences to achieve the primary goal of destabilizing the electoral process and planting doubt in the minds of the people in the legitimacy of the democratic process. As such, critical events that are prone to happen are threatening to attack, and in the eyes of Matt Aldridge of OpenText Cybersecurity, the global supply chain is really vulnerable to such sophisticated cyber attacks.
According to Microsoft and experts in the field of cybersecurity, the situation requires increased cooperation between the public and the private sector and for private companies to adopt new levels of cybersecurity. These include effective threat identification solutions, comprehensive employee awareness of cyber security, advanced protection measures to prevent risks, and fast response to incidents.
