Deepfakes, ransomware attacks causes of concern: Report

In 2020, we foresee the threat landscape becoming more challenging, as a large number of cybercriminals deploy AI to scale up their attacks, said CTO and Joint Managing Director of Quick Heal Technologies

Bengaluru: Deepfakes, threats of ransomware on cloud infrastructure holding huge amounts of data, and an uptick in web skimmers with self-deleting code capabilities will be the main areas of concern for cybersecurity experts this year, according to the threat predictions by enterprise security platform Sequrite.

Deepfakes basically take a person in an existing image or video and replace them with someone else’s likeness using artificial neural networks.They often combine and superimpose existing media onto source media using machine learning techniques.

According to the report, the evolution in ransomware attack strategies, resulting in complex attacks on cloud infrastructure, as opposed to individual users and devices is a huge possibility. A successful breach could result in massive amount of data being compromised. Meanwhile, the report states that cyberattacks may move beyond the usual denial of service attacks and result in BlueKeep-like wormable exploits in 2020.

Another area concern is the weaponisation of deepfake attacks. Security researchers at Seqrite predict this trend to gain more momentum this year, as cybercriminals conduct large-scale enterprise cyber frauds by creating fake/manipulated video and audio clips through Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

With 5G-driven interconnectivity becoming a tangible reality, the threat exposure to a multitude of services may increase substantially. Cybercriminals will look to capitalise on the new potential entry points that will open up within enterprise networks as everything from cars to refrigerators connect with each other.

Sanjay Katkar, CTO & Joint Managing Director – Quick Heal Technologies said, “In 2020, we foresee the threat landscape becoming more challenging, as a large number of cybercriminals deploy AI to scale up their attacks."