Seqrite, a cybersecurity solutions provider for enterprises, has predicted that this year will see a sharp increase in the use of Android malware. It said crime-as-a-service, malware-as-a-service and banking trojans attacking payment apps can cause enormous losses this year.

“The year will see a rise in financial frauds carried out by spyloan applications that offer easy loans after collecting a large amount of personal information, which will be used later to harass the borrower during loan recovery,” Kailash Katkar, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Seqrite, has said.

Quoting Seqrite’s report — Stay ahead of the curve: 2023 Cybersecurity Trend Forecast — he said attacks against cloud-native apps, cloud containers, data breaches involving sensitive data stored in the cloud would also rise this year.

The shape of cyber attacks to come include the following:

Vishing attacks

Vishing (Voice phishing) is a social engineering attack where the attacker calls the victim to extract information. These callers claim to represent financial institutes like banks or credit card companies to trick victims into revealing sensitive information. Often, the attacker asks the victim to install screen-sharing apps to gain access to the victim’s device. This year, the threat actors will use this malware instead of screen-sharing applications to execute attacks.

Spurt in Spyloan apps

Spyloan applications are instant loan apps that offer small loans without much paperwork but come with high-interest rates and additional fees. Collecting a large amount of personal information before loan approval is a common practice, which they use to harass the borrower during loan recovery. From sending scandalous messages to the borrower’s contacts to blackmailing them by morphing their photos, Spyloan applications are notorious for causing significant damage to the victims. This is expected to continue in the times ahead

Exploitation of remote work

We had predicted that cyber-criminals would also try to exploit the remote work conditions in 2022. Many vulnerabilities were discovered and patched in firewalls, VPN software and routers. Such discoveries, if unpatched, can lead to massive exploitation, and the data from the compromised machines are sold on the dark web to other hackers for ransomware deployment. 

Man-on-the-side attack

Like a man-in-the-middle attack (where a hacker is comfortably placed between a person and an app, gaining access to sensitive information), a man-on-the-side assault is an active attack where the attacker has regular access to the communication channel, which allows him to read the traffic and insert new messages in the exchange of messages. This allows the threat actor to implant harmful payloads. 

This attack is exceptionally devastating as it doesn’t need any interaction with the end user and only happens as a targeted attack.

Crime-as-a-service

Cybercriminals have started marketing their services in the form of crime-as-a-Service (CaaS) and malware-as-a-Service, allowing even novice hackers to directly launch targeted attacks.. This trend is also expected to grow this year.