Trends 2016: Decoding network security

By Derek Manky

The emergence of increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques will push the boundaries of detection and forensic investigation as hackers face increasing pressure from law enforcement.

As 2016 approaches, Fortinet and its threat research division, FortiGuard Labs, have made their annual predictions of the most significant trends in malware and network security going into 2016.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud will play heavily in the predictions but new malicious tactics and strategies will create unique challenges for vendors and organizations alike.

FortiGuard also predicts the emergence of increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques that will push the boundaries of detection and forensic investigation as hackers face increasing pressure from law enforcement.

The top cybersecurity trends for 2016 include:

Increased M2M attacks and propagation between devices: Several troublesome proofs of concept made headlines in 2015 demonstrating the vulnerability of IoT devices.

In 2016, though, we expect to see further development of exploits and malware that target trusted communication protocols between these devices.

FortiGuard researchers anticipate that IoT will become central to “land and expand” attacks in which hackers will take advantage of vulnerabilities in connected consumer devices to get a foothold within the corporate networks and hardware to which they connect.

Worms and viruses designed to specifically attack IoT devices:

While worms and viruses have been costly and damaging in the past, the potential for harm when they can propagate among millions or billions of devices from wearables to medical hardware is orders of magnitude greater.

FortiGuard researchers and others have already demonstrated that it is possible to infect headless devices with small amounts of code that can propagate and persist. Worms and viruses that can propagate from device-to-device are definitely on the radar.

Attacks on cloud and virtualized infrastructure: The Venom vulnerability that surfaced this year gave a hint about the potential for malware to escape from a hypervisor and access the host operating system in a virtualized environment.

Growing reliance on virtualization and both private and hybrid clouds will make these kinds of attacks even more fruitful for cybercriminals. At the same time, because so many apps access cloud-based systems, mobile devices running compromised apps can potentially provide a vector for remotely attacking public and private clouds and corporate networks to which they are connected.

New techniques that thwart forensic investigations and hide evidence of attacks: Rombertik garnered significant attention in 2015 as one of the first major pieces of “blastware” in the wild.

But while blastware is designed to destroy or disable a system when it is detected (and FortiGuard predicts the continued use of this type of malware), “ghostware” is designed to erase the indicators of compromise that many security systems are designed to detect. Thus, it can be very difficult for organizations to track the extent of data loss associated with an attack.

Malware that can evade even advanced sandboxing technologies: Many organizations have turned to sandboxing to detect hidden or unknown malware by observing the behavior of suspicious files at runtime.

Two-faced malware, though, behaves normally while under inspection and then delivers a malicious payload once it has been passed by the sandbox. This can prove quite challenging to detect but can also interfere with threat intelligence mechanisms that rely on sandbox rating systems.

Each of these trends represent a significant and novel challenge for both organizations deploying security solutions and for vendors developing them.

(The author, Derek Manky, is Global Security Strategist, Fortinet)