5 Common Themes of Modern Cybercrime

Despite how agile, lucrative and expansive modern cybercrime has become, nearly all of the digital risks that businesses face can be bucketed into a handful of prevailing drivers, trends and characteristics. In other words, this profit-churning and soul-crushing machine is not as inscrutable and amorphous as it may seem at first blush.

In general, an analysis of today's most pressing threats can be summed by five concepts:

1. Increased Attacker Sophistication
2. Varied Attack Vectors
3. Scaled-Down Polymorphic Malware
4. Non-POS Attacks on the Rise
5. Ransomware-as-a-Service Accelerating Rapidly

Of course, taken independently, each of these themes poses a unique challenge that necessitate shrewd oversight and advanced solutions that many companies lack. But understanding the common indicia of threats, combined with acquiring the knowledge to initially assess risk and take viable next steps, can go a long way to helping businesses across industries create a robust baseline of attacker defense.

As part of our continuing "Modern Cybercrime" series, we have created a must-read threat brief that helps accomplish this. The brief features a sampling of anonymized real-life breaches, references the techniques that criminals most rely on to conduct their attacks and - arguably most important of all - offers practical (but often overlooked) recommendations for helping reduce one's susceptibility to intrusion and compromise.