The threat backdrop¶
Attacks against home users come from a wider range of actors and techniques than most people expect. Nation-states, organised crime, and opportunistic individuals all operate in the same space, often using the same toolkits. The techniques themselves are not exotic: credential reuse, social engineering, unpatched software, and devices that connect to cloud infrastructure without any meaningful security controls.
Understanding what is out there is more useful than a list of rules, because rules age and the underlying patterns do not change as quickly.
The patterns that repeat across nearly every attack are worth recognising.
- Who is out there
- Criminal marketplaces
- When security tools get repurposed
- Malware as a service
- Ransomware as a service
- Infostealer as a service
- Living off the land
- Botnets
- No platform is inherently safe
- Drive-by downloads
- When MFA gets bypassed
- Quantum computing and encryption
- Overlooked dependencies