IronNet, Inc. released its 2022 Cyber Threat Intel Report, an annual report that provides an overview of events and trends impacting the cybersecurity landscape in the past year as seen and analyzed by IronNet analysts and threat hunters. The report includes an overview of significant cyber attacks and the real-world results of those attacks, cybercrime trends, the tactics and techniques threat actors have used, and 2023 predictions.

"IronNet's Annual Cyber Threat Report informs and educates our customers and the broader community about how cyber threat actors are constantly evolving their tactics to evade detection. This report complements IronNet's capabilities for enabling security teams to be more proactive in their defenses while we continue to move the community to defend against cyber threats collectively," commented Anthony Grenga, IronNet Vice President of Cyber Operations.

"We highlight several of IronNet's detections of malicious command and control (C2) infrastructure. These enhanced detections are the result of IronNet's recent launch of IronRadar, our purpose-built threat feed that uniquely identifies and tracks attacker infrastructure as it is being stood up, allowing us to block campaigns before they progress to the attack itself," noted Grenga. "Additionally, we released new features to the IronNet Collective Defense platform, adding capabilities that enable continuous automated threat hunting and detection engineering, drawing from the vast telemetry of the IronNet ecosystem and the services we offer."

Key Trends

• 2022 was busier than ever for nation-state actors, particularly the Big 4 (Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) who consistently used cyber operations to achieve their respective strategic goals.
• The Ukraine-Russia War instigated one of the largest displays of collective cybersecurity in history, resulting in a number of collective defense actions that have impacted the war.
• Large-scale ransomware attacks led to greater cybersecurity awareness and motivated many companies to put in place mitigations in case of an attack, leading cybercriminals to alter their targeting and tactics in key new ways.
• New features added to the IronNet Collective Defense platform this past year enabled the detection of various malicious alerts across enterprises in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East that previously would have appeared as more innocuous and likely overlooked.

Detection Highlights from IronRadar

As IronNet threat hunters and analysts continue their efforts in 2023, the launch of IronRadar will continue to provide unique insight into many characteristics of command and control infrastructure, allowing IronNet to map the techniques, tools, and procedures (TTPs) of how threat actors are setting up their malware infrastructure for attacks -blocking the threat before the attack causes business impact or disruption.