Noile provocări în ecosistemul de criminalitate cibernetică

The current cyber threat landscape can be influenced by geopolitical dynamics that can lead to substantial challenges. Many organized cyber criminals continue to develop their threat operations to execute high-impact attacks by extorting ransoms, disrupting governments, critical services, and exposing sensitive data. This article aims to identify in which manner the ransomware groups are expected to explore new skills and how they can integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their attacks. Another purpose is to identify how they can exploit global events and how the attacks in 2023 can be connected in 2024. The cybercriminal group that was chosen for this research is LockBit ransomware because according to the statistics from 2023, it is the most prolific cybercriminal ransomware group. Even though the main focus of this article is LockBit, there is one exception, because LockBit was disrupted by the FBI in February 2024 and another purpose is to identify how they can continue their attacks after the disruption. The main results are that cybercriminals use AI malware to execute more highly developed cyberattacks shortly and 2024 can be a year where ransomware attacks can predominate through new LLM models. This paper's main conclusions are that cybercriminals continue to launch sophisticated ransomware attacks, and they can target global events, for example: elections in the US, European Union, Olympic games, and the current military conflicts can represent significant opportunities for cyber actors.