It’s clear that in 2018, hackers were most interested in crypto. Overall these hacks operate just like any other business, pivoting and adjusting their model to maximize profits.

Generally, there was a massive shift from ransomware to crypto mining due to ease of scale and it being more serruticious and profitable. 2018 also saw a spike in phone hijacking targeting crypto whales, or large scale holder of cryptocurrency, as well as account takeovers that created social extortion networks via hacked phones and accounts.

Looking toward the new year, I predict we’ll see the increased scale of crypto mining operations, and encounter more compromised device types such as unpatched phones, IoT devices, and traditional networking devices.

We’ll most likely see larger botnets, with traditional botnets shifting toward more profitable crypto mining, the continued exploitation of two factor authentication, and major cloud exploits discovered in the underlying cloud architecture as smaller “cloud” companies compete with Amazon, Azure, and Google giants.

As blockchain technology continues to develop, we can expect more vulnerabilities will be discovered, and mega breaches and mega fines will continue globally as a response to newer reporting requirements (GDPR).

On a national scale, we saw attention on the issues of confirmed election hacking and false information campaigns, as well as social media psychological ops (PSYOPS). 2019 can expect to bring a continues rise of this activity in the United States, and in the global cyber Cold War between nation states.

Jason Truppi: Jason is a career technologist turned FBI agent and now entrepreneur. He has two decades of experience building, securing and investigating networks; working on some of the largest national security and criminal cyber intrusion cases as an FBI Cyber Special Agent in the United States. More recently, he was Director of Endpoint Detection and Response at Tanium, an enterprise security software company. He continues to drive cyber policy as a Center for Strategic & International Studies Cybersecurity Fellow.