Rapid digitalization in recent months has inexorably accelerated the evolution of cybersecurity. Here are the most recent trends and developments that we anticipate in the near future.
With multiple high-profile cases, the past years have demonstrated how unpredictable cyberterrorism can be. The most well-known incidents, naming the shutdown of a US gasoline pipeline or the Log4j vulnerability as a conduit for crypto mining, ransomware, and botnets, are only a few amongst the whole lot.
Many attacks have occurred due to the rapid digitalization that many firms have experienced in recent months. As a result, most business leaders view cybersecurity as an operational priority for securing their company and developing various trends along the way.
Here’s our prediction for what the next years have in store in terms of cybersecurity.
An Increase in Overall Awareness
According to Infosec, 97% of individuals worldwide have no idea how to spot a phishing email. As a result, human error continues to be a substantial element in several data breaches that occur. Therefore, businesses are taking further measures to enhance their security as cyber-attacks become more active.
Organizations now increasingly encourage enhancing the skills of their employees through training and not just building more complex firewalls and IT processes. Because of this, we’re finally realizing that employee cyber risk management is essential to avoid a user-related data breach and establish regulatory compliance.
Unfortunately, as already indicated, phishing is still among the most effective methods of cybercriminals attacks. Even more so, remote work makes it more difficult for enterprises to guarantee that their users are not victims. A key factor is the increasing sophistication of these sorts of attacks. Hackers are now employing more creative methods to fool employees into exposing personal data or downloading malicious files. Business Email Compromise (BEC), for instance, is a typical type of phishing assault that utilizes personalized research on a particular person to develop an attack that can be difficult to differentiate from a legitimate email.
When you partner these increasingly sophisticated attacks with the widespread perception that phishing is simple to recognize, it’s no surprise that many firms are expected to experience phishing-related breaches in 2022. This is why, at Hexacta, we devote time, money, and manpower to such an issue, providing all our team with ongoing specialized training to detect and report phishing attacks as soon as they suspect they are being targeted.
Ransomware Cyberattacks Are On The Rise
Technology’s continuous advancement and the potential for increasingly catastrophic consequences are crucial. It could be the rise of cybercrime-as-a-service, which makes ransomware assaults simpler and more accessible, or the rising number of catastrophic outages in vital control systems or IoT devices.
As per study conclusions, 71% of cyberattacks in 2020 were motivated by money. Ransomware attacks that often include holding a company’s database hostage and demanding a ransom to release it are a kind of crime that we predict will keep growing this year. A single malicious file downloaded may seriously harm a company’s revenues and reputation. Therefore, as highlighted in our first point above, professionals should be prepared and trained to deal with emails and information from unknown or untrustworthy sources.
Several businesses are turning to cloud security-as-a-service options in response to ransomware as well as malware concerns. This is where managed service providers (MSPs) or managed security service providers (MSSPs) come to the rescue. This method provides a broader group of technical specialists with a deeper and more diversified understanding of products and processes. Furthermore, the cost is lower this way since you receive the services of a security expert along with an OS, virtualization, network administrator, and more for the same price as a permanent IT professional.
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is one of the most current trends in cybersecurity. Through the usage of ML, cybersecurity is becoming more straightforward, effective, and cost-efficient. ML can detect and interpret patterns to, for example, react and respond to active assaults in real-time.
ML learns from extensive and complex data that must originate from multiple sources and reflect as many different scenarios as necessary. As a result of ML implementation, cybersecurity systems can assess threat patterns and learn cybercriminal behavior. These aid in preventing similar potential attacks and minimizing the time required for cybersecurity professionals to execute routine operations.
Synthetic Identity Fraud
Synthetic identity fraud is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the United States, potentially spreading to other nations. Scammers blend real and fraudulent data to invent a new identity and financially deceive individuals in this sort of fraud. Credit card inquiries and digital account openings are examples of such crimes because they’re much easier to carry online.
According to analysts, we’re suffering the consequences of emerging organized recruiters who make it more difficult for businesses to uncover fraudsters throughout the process of hiring. This happens in the form of scammers employed as workers and given access to sensitive information. This is proof that any business must invest in authenticating candidate identities using both public and private sources with broad access to a record of consistent data to prevent this from happening.
The rise of such synthetic identity scams demonstrates that businesses and government agencies are unprepared to cope with this type of criminality. As a matter of fact, identity management is still a problem all over the world. That’s why, as mentioned by McKinsey analysts, the most significant investments that firms must undertake to help guarantee cyber safety in 2022 are identity management as well as message and network security.
To deal with this, the Zero-Trust paradigm can be used to limit network access. Default access is deleted, and authorized users are permitted access depending on trends based on identity, time, and device based on contextual awareness. During this process, everything should pass security procedures like access control and user identification verification which makes it safer and more secure.
IoT with 5G Network
Computing devices incorporated in IoT products enable data transmission and reception over the Internet. As a result of the introduction and development of 5G networks, IoT will usher in a new era of interconnectivity. These are famously susceptible because of their design priorities of ease of use and connectivity.
New vulnerabilities in IoT systems are discovered regularly due to software bugs, a lack of security, or a latency in debugging. One Forescout Research study has shown that 33 fatal IoT flaws affected four open-source TCP/IP stacks in 2020. According to Forescout, such stacks are the underpinning connectivity elements of millions of devices worldwide.
Consumer, commercial, and IoT devices within businesses have propelled the explosive growth of IoT systems. 5G technology will improve certain IoT functionalities, resulting in a plethora of IoT devices and ultimately leading to a security risk that people and businesses are ill-equipped to handle.
Since 5G technology is still pretty recent, it is believed that extensive research will be required to find weaknesses that will enable the system to be protected from external attacks. These include hackers exploiting weaknesses and rapidly distributing malware over IoT networks, interrupting supply chains, or launching a coordinated denial of service assault employing a cluster of routers as an IoT botnet.
Decision Process
Business cybersecurity needs are growing in the face of a possible cyberattack scenario, transitioning towards a more flexible security approach. As a result of the goal, scale, and ambiguity of digital business, cybersecurity judgments, responsibility, and accountability must take place throughout organizational divisions rather than being centralized.
This explains the reasoning as to why the Chief Information Security Officer’s (CISO) function has evolved from being a technical subject matter expert to an executive risk manager. However, today’s corporate demands are too complex for a single centralized cybersecurity role. Therefore, CISOs must rethink their duties in order to inspire business leaders and make it simpler for them to make educated risk judgments.
What to Expect Next
Nobody knows what the future of cybersecurity holds, and many sectors are still attempting to improve their networks despite the ongoing chaos. But one thing we know for sure is that these cybersecurity trends will undoubtedly cause more firms to level up their security measures.
Security software developers, administrators and managers will indeed have a lot on their plates in the upcoming years. Infrastructure security is an essential aspect of practically any firm today, and it would be wise for companies to kick off their cybersecurity education program as soon as possible.
We must all understand comprehensive techniques to safeguard our infrastructure, including data and information security, risk analysis and mitigation, cloud-based security architecture, and compliance, among others. All players need to step up their game, from team members to executives, working towards becoming experts in this fast-growing field.
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