From Top Cybersecurity Professionals
#CyberSecurity
Predictions for 2021
More than 50 cybersecurity experts, thought leaders, and industry professionals have shared their predictions about cyber trends we should expect in 2021.
What does 2021 have in store for the cybersecurity industry?
Share, tweet, like, and comment about these forecasts and let us know what you agree or disagree with.
Check out predictions from Cybersecurity experts
Shamane Tan
Chief Growth Officer, Privasec
With our world shifting into the virtual landscape, this can only mean that more information will be made even more available to the public, and it will be unsurprising for cybercrime to evolve and manifest in different creative forms.
Satish Bhagavatula
CTO | Engineering, Technology & DevOps Leader | Cloud Operations
CISOs, IT and Product leadership of SaaS providers will explore Governance & Operational transformation while shifting-[Security]-left through automation, adopting SecDevOps methodologies, and imbibing a balanced Risk-Based Vulnerability Management philosophy to prepare themselves against increased product security incidents which are impacting millions of customers, not to mention corporate & government embarrassments and losses.
Daniel
Security Analyst - CSW
Organizations will give more importance towards weakly maintained information exposed to the Internet which cyber criminals can take advantage of targeted information to deliver more relevant Targeted attacks, phishing campaigns, malwares - to explore more insights and devise new infiltration techniques
Arjun
Security Analyst - CSW
Spear phishing, password spraying, and exploiting internet-facing assets, are the most popular infection vector when it comes to nation-states actors' activity and will continue to dominate in 2021.
Steve Hunter
Senior Director, Systems Engineering - Asia Pacific & Japan - ForeScout Technologies Inc.
Organizations will need to determine how they will adapt to this new world, now that it has become clear that working remotely is not only possible for many but, in some cases, preferred. This means that Zero Trust capabilities will be more important than ever as corporate laptops connect to home, coffee shop and hotel networks around the world, mingling corporate devices with riskier ones that are no longer controlled by enterprise cybersecurity teams.
Catherine Allen
Founder and Chairman, The Santa Fe Group
In 2021 we will continue to see concerns about supply chain management and the management of risk when outsourcing. Location risk, geopolitical risks and reputational risk issues will be at the forefront along with cybersecurity risks, where adversaries will focus on the weakest link…the third and fourth party suppliers.
Sachit Singh
Director, Cyber Security
We have seen that there is an increased adoption of SaaS and the pandemic has further propelled this adoption. Data protection, strong authentication and visibility into the SaaS configuration will be critical to the firms.Insider abuse to misconfiguration in SaaS can be equally disastrous. The enterprises will start building the controls from protection to visibility to remediation to have a more holistic approach when it comes to SaaS.
Vengatesh
Technical Project Manager - CSW
Tapendra Dev
Founder & CEO Secure Blink
CISO & CSO are transitioning towards a durable cybersecurity solution in compliance with the zero-trust strategy, and SASE occupies right into that space substantially.
Vandana Verma
Global Board of Directors at OWASP & InfosecGirls
Prediction for next year is the companies are adopting and understanding the importance of security in the cloud, at the same time DevSecOps with chaos engineering is becoming an important thing with a pinch of automation and AI.
George Do
SVP & CISO, Gojek
Very large fines will be levied on firms due to data breaches that compromise the privacy of customers / consumers. Cybersecurity skills gap will continue to grow and force security programs to outsource and/or train incumbent staff to upskill even more. Nation states will continue efforts to embed backdoors at the hardware layer. The majority of successful hacks is achieved by the compromise of user accounts or credentials (vs. exploiting a vulnerability)
Steve Stobo
Director at Cyber Consultancy Services (CCS) Limited
Attacks against 3rd party suppliers will increase as hackers look for smaller, softer targets that are either connected to or share Personal Identifiable Information (PII) with larger corporates, but do not necessarily have the highest levels of security protection. Without knowing the security and compliance risks that your 3rd party suppliers have you will be blind to the risks that they pose to you
Hitoshi Kokumai
Founder & Managing Director Mnemonic Identity Solutions
“I would predict that 2021 will be the year that the global population will start to discover the real value of 'hard-to-forget', 'hard-to-break' and 'panic-proof' secret credentials for secure and sustainable digital identity."
Diana Kelley
CTO & Founding Partner SecurityCurve
Passwords are a challenge, no one likes having to remember a lot of different ones and stolen passwords lead to account compromise. This is why I expect 2021 to see consumers adopting password wallets/managers that generate unique passwords for each account and then store them safely. Enterprises will continue to move towards “passwordless” strategies and both consumers and enterprises will implement MFA (multi-factor authentication) such as one-time use codes via text and biometrics to improve password-only security.
Prof John Walker
Nottingham Trent University
Successful Cyber Attacks will continue with more high-profile companies falling to compromise. Sadly, 2021 will not be the year we see real steps taken toward Cyber Resilience - but it will be the year in which we encounter a more serious mindset toward addressing the aspect of Cyber Security. We may have to wait for 2022 and beyond to see those thoughts formulate into tangible action.
Jacqueline Jayne
Security Awareness Advocate, KnowBe4
“There is a continuing and growing conversation about cybersecurity culture. Last year's prediction on this focus area was premature. We haven’t seen the uptake for company-wide KPIs related to cybersecurity expectations for training, behavior and reporting. However, after the release of The Australian Cybersecurity Strategy 2020, I am more confident that the conversation is becoming louder and the need for security awareness training is front of mind.”
Jelle Wieringa
Security Advocate, Public Speaker, Advisor, KnowBe4u
Consumers will see an increase in Whatsapp and SMS fraud. Not only will the number of scams increase, but cybercriminals will become bolder by asking for higher amounts of money and using more forceful and devious techniques to manipulate people into paying.
Adv Rajas Pingle
International Cyber Law Expert | Cyber Crime Lawyer | Advocate | Professor | Privacy & Data Protection
Year 2020 has seen a considerable increase in data breaches and further upsurge is expected with the rise of unemployment across the globe due to the pandemic. In this context, the Indian Personal Data Protection Act which is to be enacted by 2021, will increase personal data consciousness among the masses, compel the corporates to take adequate measures to safeguard user data and increase cybersecurity to avoid hefty penalties. The silver lining in this is that the PDPA might act as a stimulus in reducing overall cyber security incidents in India.
Nitin S
DevSecOps Enthusiast | CyberSecurity | CloudSecurity
Indian startups will start to look into the security maturity and data privacy concerns to avoid future data breaches.
Donald Firesmith
System/Software Engineer and Author
As recognition of the importance of resilience engineering increases, cybersecurity's contribution to resilience will become increasingly recognized. However, while cybersecurity is an essential part of resilience, it will become increasingly recognized that the adversities that can disrupt critical capabilities extend well beyond cybersecurity threats and attacks. Resilience also involves adversities associated with capacity, interoperability, longevity, robustness, safety, and survivability.
Marcin Szczepanik
CISO, Essar Oil (UK)
More Companies will be impacted by cyber threats, and many of them will start investing in Cyber Security. It will take another year though to improve their posture.
Macy Dennis
CSO - Evotek
I think the threat landscape will be similar to 2020 with a likelihood of an uptick in supply chain attacks, as well as in 3rd and 4th party risks. Additionally, I expect the trend in nation-state activity to increase dramatically in 2021.
Satish
Team Lead, CSW
Corporate networks or devices which can be connected by employees from outside, for example, the company's intranet or security infrastructure from coffee shops, restaurants, railway stations, hotels, and other public wifi access will be more open and prone to cyber-attacks.
Matt Stamper
CISO, Executive Advisor - EVOTEK
2021 will be the year of SOAR and investments in enhanced detection technologies including deception. I am cautiously optimistic that the improvements in security automation, the outstanding work in discovering zero-day vulnerabilities, and other software flaws will improve such that we'll see real reductions in dwell time. I also predict that cybersecurity as a topic for the board of directors will continue to be front-and-center - notably for public companies who are required by the SEC to provide accurate and complete disclosures related to their cyber risks. This focus will drive enhancements as to how organizations address patching and vulnerability management for their technology stacks. Sadly, we will also see the loss of life where OT or healthcare-related technologies are compromised, exposing new levels of liability for organizations in critical sectors.
Wai Kit Cheah
Director, Security Practice at Lumen Technologies
With remote work, employees are no longer within the safety and confines of their corporate network. In a home environment, they would not be protected from malicious websites, drive-by downloads, malvertisements, as they would be in their corporate network behind security policies and protection layers. Chances are much higher that endpoints could inadvertently download a malicious malware or be infected with ransomware.
Passwords will remain as the default factor for authentication in cyberspace. Only the password security technology will be reinvented with hybrid text and non-text graphical passwords.
Debesh Choudhury, Infosecurity Specialist
My prediction is that things will get worse before getting better. When the realization will be that the legacy computing system was never intended to be used the way it is today - by novice users to communicate over the internet - a new computer will be developed by system experts (software experts that have trouble in understanding the value of the hardware in the wide perspective of system design). In the future, the focus will be to protect the user and the computer. Content will be separated from form. Out of band secure channels will continuously operate parallel to the insecure internet communications. Users will not need to worry about malware infecting their systems.
Moti Barkan, Founder at HackNot
Cyber security law is going to be the new jewel in the crown in 2021 with the legal policy, regulatory aspects surrouding cyber security assuming a lot of significance. I believe that roles, responsibilities and legal compliance relating to cyber security at global and national levels and standards and common denominators will have to be defined
Adv Sai Sushanth
I predict that usable security will become a goal, users will no longer be forced to have long complex passwords when they will see that they have better options for small creative passwords. Companies will see reduced cyber risks with innovative login and smart mfa solutions. Data privacy friendly solutions will be in demand.
Nehal Mehta, President at Rainbow Secure
Organizations will see more and more third party security services and platforms fall victim to the very attacks they are trying to protect their customers from. Current trends in outsourcing services, including security services, will make residual risk and Third party risk management a hot topic of debate moving forward.
Thomas Uehera, Cyber security evangelist
More Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) attacks will be commonly obtainable and can be weaponized from criminal networks. The darknet will let cybercriminals buy access to more sensitive information about the corporate networks.
Vijaykumar, Senior Security Analyst at CSW
Threat actors will progressively be targeting the most critical publicly available assets held by organizations through massive phishing campaigns, Advance OSINT techniques, post-intrusion, deep enumeration of networks. Precious information involved Industries will experience active cyber attacks. As we started seeing both Iran and China targeting not only research companies, also other sectors of government, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and non-governmental organizations. Organizations that fail to provide continuous awareness on IOCs and IOAs to the employees will face huge impacts while cyberattacks
Vijaykumar, Senior Security Analyst at CSW
The war - Ransomware VS Security Community. 2021 will have a Rapid growth in Ransomware attacks with highly customized Ransomware with advanced TTPs, evolving varieties, increased frequency of attacks which is gonna be a trendsetter ransomware-as-a-service.
Vijaykumar, Senior Security Analyst at CSW
Rush to push everything to the cloud approach will results in many security holes, challenges, cloud misconfigurations, and outages that can be leveraged by attackers to get into foothold company networks
Vijaykumar, Senior Security Analyst at CSW
Organizations Will Recognize the Need to Look Deeper Into Their Third-party Vendors.
Sandeep, Security Analyst at CSW
The number of cyberattacks by nation states/APT groups will continue to grow.
Sandeep, Security Analyst at CSW
Exposed APIs will be the next favored attack vector for enterprise breaches.
Sandeep, Security Analyst at CSW
