The Impact of Geopolitical Tensions on the Evolution of Cybercrime

In recent years, the security landscape has become highly complex, largely due to the expanding attack surface. Organizations are rapidly accelerating toward cloud adoption, increasing their reliance on third-party vendors, and embracing the use of corporate mobile devices to reduce the mobile attack surface and ensure device compliance.

In addition, cybercrime groups have evolved considerably over the past two years in their sophistication and approach to adopt a specialized "as-a-service” business model. Moreover, the recent geopolitical climate has played an important role in how adversaries are targeting their victims, for as geopolitical tensions rise, so do cyber threats from state-sponsored adversaries.

Throughout 2022, research from eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU), based on attempted cyberattacks across eSentire’s global customer base, has demonstrated an increase in cyber threats resulting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict wherein Russian-based ransomware groups are motivated to inflict damage and sow civil unrest.

In this report, eSentire’s TRU and CrowdStrike partnered to highlight notable trends observed for ransomware attacks, how geopolitical tensions impact the evolution of cybercrime, and how you can better protect your organization against state-sponsored attacks.