Cyber criminals can use intelligence to carry out attacks more easily and thus cause more damage. Europol is warning of this in a joint study on the malicious use of intelligence. According Europol reports, the cyber criminals should be able in the future to increase their chances of winning, exploit new victims and develop business models in a shorter period of time. At the same time, it reduces their risk of getting caught.
Criminal Attempts At Deception
The experts conclude that hackers will on the one hand, use intelligence as a means of attack. For example, you could guess passwords and make malware even more dangerous. At the same time, poorly secured applications also served them as a worthwhile target for attacks.
Content such as photos and video, which is changed and falsified with the help of the intelligence, is currently the most known use as a tool for cyber attempts at deception. Control and defense innovations are required to reduce the danger of false campaigns. Intelligence could also be used to support engineering attempts on a large scale, the study found. There are already examples of how attacks can be made more successful with text in high quality. The researchers also warn of malware that could be used to read mass amounts of information from files.
According to the report, cyber attacks such as Emotet, in which the victims are selected even more detailed, are also likely to become more dangerous. The intelligence would also give cyber criminals the means to circumvent image recognition.
Typical hacking variants can be reinforced with networks, for example, and the traces of such attempts can be better hidden, the experts write. You refer to the open source tool for penetration tests and the comparable network. Researchers have already presented an element that embeds intelligence capabilities in malware that it can hardly be seen from the outside.