MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. Social engineering,5G and the Internet of things, as well as the leakage of personal data will be the main cybersecurity trends in 2020. This is according to the experts TASS interviewed for its portal "The Future of Russia. National Projects."
Experts note that the trend of recent years - fraud through social engineering is likely to remain in 2020.
In 2019, the Bank of Russia reported about a new way of fraud - phone calls with a number insertion. The purpose was to steal the funds of bank customers. According to the regulator, between September 2018 and August 2019, the number of such calls soared 39 times: almost 5,000 numbers were blocked.
"2019 was a year of social attacks exploiting simultaneously the weaknesses of human psychology, the problem with the possibility of substituting caller identification (CID) (phone numbers displayed during an incoming call), as well as leakage of client data from banks. The fact that callers own not only personal data, but are also informed about recent transactions, makes people trust them and they share SMS authorization codes with cybercriminals," says Ashot Hovhannisyan, founder and technical director of DeviceLock. According to him, this year, the share of fake payment receipts will increase, including those related to payment of utilities, debt collection on loans, as well as court orders and fines.
"Moreover, if in 2019 the bulk of the attacks were made using fake payment documents sent to individuals, this year, most likely, a small segment of fake executive documents sent by fraudsters directly to banks will grow," he said.
The cybercriminals succeed in applying such schemes using leaks from client databases of banks or buying cheap personal databases available in the so-called darknet, Hovhannisyan explains.
Growing number of devices, including lamps and electric kettles, that can be connected to the Internet can also be a threat, information security experts note.
"Today, in any network, an attacker can disable components of a smart home or of the industrial Internet of things. With the spread of 5G networks and the development of the Internet of things, the threat will grow, cars or city life support systems connected to the Internet can become victims of cyberattacks. As long as 5G networks are built on the basis of networks of past generations, all the shortcomings of their protection will be relevant for 5G subscribers," experts at Positive Technologies believe.
"Digitalization of the economy will strengthen the interest of cybercriminals in the Internet of things," confirms Andrei Yankin, head of the Information Security Center at Jet Infosystems.
According to Avast Smart Home Report-2019, 44% of Russian smart homes (based on more than 1.1 million home network checks) have at least one vulnerable device that can undermine the security of the entire network.