Looking back at 2018, the fight against malware showed glimmers of promise, as new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were successfully deployed in some quarters to fight high-priority threats like ransomware. The outlook for 2019 is less rosy, though, as malicious state actors and cybercriminals prepare for battle with a new array of tools and techniques designed to create mayhem and reap profits at the expense of everyone else. Buckle up, IT security pros: the following trends indicate the anti-malware ride in 2019 is going to be a bumpy one.

One month after the release of the Acronis True Image 2019 Cyber Protection update, we’ve already gotten some interesting findings and amazing results to share from our update to our Acronis Active Protection defensive technologies. One of the major features added as part of the Cyber Protection update was the ability to detect and stop potential cryptomining malware in Windows systems, safeguarding the machines resources, performance and potential hardware of Acronis True Image users. While we did not expect to see a lot of detections during the initial rollout, the telemetry data collected so far – surprisingly – shows the opposite.

The use of gold as money began thousands of years ago – as gold was the most resistant to aging and elements. During the early and high Middle Ages, Byzantine gold Solidus was the de-facto standard through the Europe and Mediterranean. As the Byzantine empire declined, its importance diminished together with the supply of gold, and European territories adopted silver to expand the money supply and extend their economies.

We’ve blogged about RanSim before: it’s a nice tool from KnowBe4, a security awareness training company that employs the famous former hacker, Kevin Mitnick. They help people learn about IT security and prepare for various security threats. RanSim originally served as a ransomware simulator – allowing users to see if their systems were protected against ransomware attacks without the risk of the real thing. Recently, KnowBe4 updated RanSim so that it also emulates cryptojackers – the latest, fast-growing malware threat that targets computers and mobile devices to hijack system resources to secretly mine cryptocurrency – and Acronis' cyber protection technology performed extremely well.