The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is an emerging Web3 technology that is currently seeing widespread abuse by threat actors. Cisco Talos has observed multiple ongoing campaigns that leverage the IPFS network to host their malware payloads and phishing kit infrastructure while facilitating other attacks. IPFS is often used for legitimate purposes, which makes it more difficult for security teams to differentiate between benign and malicious IPFS activity in their networks.
This cybersecurity incident is a really elegant case study that illustrates core concepts central to how we analyze a socio-technical system here at OODA Loop – core concepts we will return to often in the next couple of months as we provide a final analysis of certain research thematics (misinformation, AI innovation, etc.) and findings from our 2022 research agenda.