Cybercrime continues to expand and evolve and has become a national security-level threat that is enabling more attacks by state-backed groups, Google warned in a new report. “The vast cybercriminal ecosystem has acted as an accelerant for state-sponsored hacking, providing malware, vulnerabilities, and in some cases full-spectrum operations to states,” said Ben Read, senior manager at Google Threat Intelligence Group. The rapid evolution of cybercrime has also facilitated state-backed hacking efforts, providing governments with a breeding ground for talent and allowing states to simply purchase cyber capabilities or co-opt criminal operations for their own purposes. The marketplace at the center of the cybercrime ecosystem has made every actor easily replaceable and the whole problem resilient to disruption,” said Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence. Released ahead of the Munich Security Conference, the Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant research covers their investigations throughout 2024 and observations from the last four years. The report notes that despite the increasing volume of cybercrime, it receives much less attention from national security practitioners compared to incidents involving state-backed groups. Several notable ransomware gangs turned their focus to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and state-backed operations like APT44, APT29, UNC2589 and Turla have all shown evidence of exploiting information or access obtained by criminal organizations. Google said the share of posts on data leak sites related to healthcare has doubled over the past three years, at the same time as the number of data leak sites tracked by the company’s researchers has increased by nearly 50% year-over-year. But Google experts found that state-backed groups were leveraging the expansion of the cybercriminal ecosystem for their own benefit.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:10:19 +0000