Cyber crime: where the threat comes from

Workplace heterogeneity, for example, is now one of the biggest challenges in IT security The immediate dispatch of employees to work from home was one of the greatest demands placed on IT and security departments  in recent years. Working from home (WFH), together with mobile and agile working models including “bring your own device”, offer great opportunities ─ but they also open up new areas of attack. Attackers are skilfully exploiting this development to their advantage.

Attacks based on AI (artificial intelligence) are also increasingly coming to the fore and regarded as a growing threat in the Cyber Security Threat Radar. They are used for targeted disinformation, as in the case of deepfakes, for instance. A recent example is the Tiktok channel “Deeptomcruise”, which caused a furore with videos showing Tom Cruise doing magic tricks and playing golf. The real magic trick, however, was the video itself. For once the Hollywood star was not standing in front of the camera and knew nothing about it. It is an almost perfect fake, created using AI. This enables cyber criminals to use a range of different information to automatically fabricate an artificial profile, which is extremely difficult to spot as a fake. The measures that companies can take against these and other challenges are explained in the report.