PETALING JAYA: The cybersecurity threats to companies could likely become more proliferated as the cybercriminal groups splinter into new sub-groups and ramp up attacks.
Experts warned that data is showing that the number of known ransomware groups has increased as the groups splinter, and in the process, some have become less predictable.
“Driven primarily by financial reasons, the cybersecurity attacks can be due to various factors,” said Jonathan Crompton, partner at RPC.
“One of them is that there is an increase in regulation across Asia, which means that companies are becoming more acutely aware that they need to notify, and so they become a ‘better’ target.
“Another rationale that we see is that companies in certain jurisdictions, including Malaysia, can be less secure than others because they haven’t reached the same cybersecurity maturity that there is in other places. That will come.
“There may be other more politically-motivated factors why Malaysian companies are being targeted,” he said in Kuala Lumpur yesterday after a roundtable discussion on cyber incident and data breach response.
Last week, Bursa Malaysia stated a few brokerages had encountered cybersecurity incidents within their system components but without any evidence of unauthorised trading or financial loss.
The exchange’s platforms, networks and infrastructure were not compromised but Bursa Malaysia had directed all brokers and selected vendors to conduct comprehensive screening of their systems.
The attack at the unnamed brokerages in the public market was the second incident in less than a year.
Apart from the ransomware threat becoming proliferated, the members of splintered groups may be going after the same targets again under their new groups as well as new targets.
The evolution of computing power could present another challenge in the future.
“The current topic of conversation is threat actors’ tactic to extract and hold.
“Just extract it from the system and then hold it until the quantum computing system is able to crack the protections in place.
“So that's a current issue but for a future problem,” he warned.
