North Korean Insider Threats
March 2025: The rise in infiltrating organisations by embedding operatives as external consultants has increased significantly since the end of 2024 into 2025. North Korea is seen as the main exponent of this approach, with a specific focus on the IT sector.
These operatives pose as freelance IT workers, securing remote positions in companies. Their objectives seem to be twofold: generating income for the North Korean regime and trying to gain access to sensitive information.
Their approach is to create false identities, qualifications, and employment history and often use deepfake technologies and stolen identities to navigate recruitment processes. The detection has become more difficult due to the shift towards remote working, where detection becomes more challenging.
Often the operatives gain access to sensitive information, opening companies to data theft, sabotage, and industrial espionage.
If recruiting external consultants, especially if they will be working remotely, companies need to ensure they have enhanced vetting processes, continuous monitoring to detect unusual activities, but most importantly educate line managers on how to recognise red flags during and post the recruitment process.
Ransomware as a Service (RaaS)
March 2025: Ransomware as a Service is a growing threat due to would-be attackers not requiring the skill sets to develop or distribute the malicious code, but just go to the online supermarket and buy it as a service, lowering the barrier to entry for cybercrime.
Ransomware targeting cloud infrastructure is on the rise due to the increase in reliance on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with attacks on cloud backups where the attacker is trying to encrypt or delete them to make recovery impossible.
RaaS groups are buying zero-day vulnerabilities to penetrate systems before patches are available. In addition, they are targeting and recruiting insiders to provide privileged access to critical infrastructures and supply chains, such as healthcare, energy, telecoms and finance.
