What we Learned from Accenture’s Cyber Threatscape Report

22nd August 2019


Stuart Reed
VP Products

Accenture has launched its annual Threatscape Report and it had some interesting findings that align well with our own insight at Nominet Cyber. The financial services industry is also highlighted as an industry at risk.

Below are my top three takeaways from the report:

  • Cyber crime groups are automating, they’re pooling resources and they’re becoming harder to distinguish from each other
  • Ransomware attacks are increasing, more than tripling in the past two years, and groups such as Nikolay and GandCrab are planting these directly onto networks
  • Disinformation campaigns from threat actors could destabilize financial markets. With high-frequency trading algorithms relying on fast, text-driven sources of information, this could be compromised by malicious actors and consequently impact not only the financial industry itself but potentially economies too

Accenture is advising organizations to ‘pivot their approach to security regularly to achieve cyber resilience’.

Interestingly, this is exactly why the network, and specifically the DNS layer, can prove so valuable in terms of identifying both “known” and “unknown” threats early. With DNS being ubiquitous it can be used to protect the network when other security precautions have failed.

Take a look at this report from the UK Government which explains how its PDNS service is currently defending public institutions against attack.