Financial threats to accelerate in 2021: Kaspersky

Financial threats to accelerate in 2021: Kaspersky

In 2021, many financial cybercriminals are likely to target Bitcoin more often, while other cybercriminals will switch to transit cryptocurrencies when demanding payment from victims for enhanced privacy, a report from Kaspersky says.

On top of that, extortion practices will become even more widespread, be it as part of DDoS or ransomware attacks, with the operators of the latter consolidating and using advanced exploits to target victims.

Financial cyber threats are among the most dangerous as they directly impact the financial wellbeing of victims - be it individuals or organisations. Drastic changes in 2020 unavoidably affected the way financial attackers operate. Albeit not all of the tactics, techniques and procedures have been influenced by the change of how we live and work nowadays, their influence cannot be understated.

Kaspersky predictions of the important developments in the financial threat landscape of 2021 are below:

MageCarting, or so-called JS-skimming (the method of stealing payment card data from e-commerce platforms), attacks will move to the server-side. Evidence shows that from day to day there are fewer threat actors relying on client-side attacks that use JavaScript. Kaspersky researchers expect that next year the attacks will shift to the server-side.

Read: Half of UAE