The past year has been extremely eventful in terms of the digital threats faced by financial institutions: cybercrime groups have used new infiltration techniques, and the geography of attacks has become more extensive. According to the KSN statistics by Kaspersky Lab (www.Kaspersky.com), the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region witnessed 17% increase in banking malware attack to reach almost half a million attacks in 2018. Cryptocurrencies have also become an established part of many people’s lives, and a more attractive target for cybercriminals across the world, which resulted in a rapid increase in malicious mining of cryptocurrencies.
“The META region is becoming more appealing to cybercriminals, with financial and malicious cyrpotomining attacks taking center stage. We discovered six new ATM malware families in 2018. On the other hand, illegal mining of cryptocurrencies has increased dramatically to overtake the main threat of the last few years: ransomware. We believe the reason behind this is that mining is silent and cause less impact that ransomware, making it less noticeable,” said Fabio Assolini, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
In the end, this trend will be driven by people rather than the technology’s capability, as organisations and industries come to the conclusion that blockchain has a rather narrow scope of application, and most attempts to use in different ways are not justified. The reliable application of blockchain beyond cryptocurrency has been explored and experimented with for years, but there is little evidence of achievement. 2019 will be the year people stop trying.
Until January 2018, there were immense highs and lows in the price of Bitcoin. These is not expected to return as the value of cryptocurrencies levels out to reflect their popularity. There is a finite audience for whom cryptocurrencies are of interest, and once that limit is reached, the price will not rise further.
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About Kaspersky Lab Kaspersky Lab (www.Kaspersky.com) is a global cybersecurity company, which has been operating in the market for 21 years. Kaspersky Lab’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into next generation security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky Lab technologies and we help 270,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them.