Cyber Security 2022 Prediction by
Steve Stobo
Director at Cyber Consultancy Services (CCS) Limited
Predicted about #Cyber Attacks #Cyber Hygiene #Cyber Security Awareness #Cyber Security Services #Data Privacy #Ransomware Attacks
2022 Predictions
Prediction #1
Standards such as ISO27001 (information and data security) will become more important to smaller businesses, as their larger customers start to demand proof that they can look after any data or information shared with them. If you can't prove how secure you are (and have it independently verified) then you’re not secure!
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Prediction #2
Attacks on third-party suppliers will continue to increase (as they did in 2021) as hackers look for softer targets with smaller IT budgets and weaker security to get to larger businesses’ data. Many businesses still rely on questionnaires to ask a supplier how secure they are, the information they get back is aspirational at best and downright false at worst leading to a false sense of security.
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Prediction #3
Many businesses will still continue to waste money on point solutions to individual security weaknesses like a band-aid. They need to ensure that they have accurate, contextualized, and measurable improvements for cybersecurity and a roadmap for future areas of review and action to ensure their budgets are not wasted. Maybe the board will see that cybersecurity is an investment in their business, their customers, and their employees, rather than being a cost that must be endured every year.
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Prediction #4
My main prediction is that attacks will continue to happen, businesses will be breached, they will be held to ransom (and some will pay) and unfortunately, some will fail because of it. Lessons will be learned (but necessarily addressed) and the battle between the hackers and security specialists will continue.
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2021 Predictions
Prediction #1
Companies will realize they need the right business processes in place to protect against cyber-crime and not just the right technology. You can have the best security solutions in the world, but without getting the business in order first, educating the users (and the board) about cyber risks, then the money they spend could be wasted!
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Prediction #2
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.
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Prediction #3
Companies have invested massively in Cyber security over the years, but the boards will push back and ask for proof as to the value that these solutions have delivered, “how much have they reduced our risk?”, and “how much money have they potentially saved us if we were breached?” Budgets will decrease in line with headcounts and companies will look at consolidating security platforms to save money, time, and resources that are traditionally required to run point solutions. Larger companies will look towards better value from smaller partners and more niche players that can combine multi service lines and solutions to address their business drivers and deliver business outcomes without the overheads and costs of the traditional large system integrators
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Prediction #4
Cyber-attacks on businesses will be more sophisticated using a combination approach of social media (LinkedIn), email, and cloud services combined, say an attack starts in LinkedIn with an innocent message to connect, then messages exchanged, then finally information is sent in an attachment (all via LinkedIn), which carries a link to a cloud platform such as AWS. Google, Azure, etc., which in turn is where the malicious payload is.
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Prediction #5
More companies will suffer CEO fraud, Account takeover, malware, ransomware, phishing etc and AI and machine learning will be a marketeers’ dream come true and offer the golden ticket for security companies to promote even more heavily in 2021.
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Other Predictions About #CyberSecurity
Saravanan Ganesan
Security Analyst at CSW
As deepfake technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, it is likely to be used on a much wider scale by cybercriminals and fraudsters. The potential to dupe victims by accurately impersonating individuals through video or audio is extremely worrying. Using artificial intelligence (AI), cybercriminals or fraudsters use the deepfake technology to either impersonate a person's face, voice, or both to carry out scams, fraud, and social engineering attacks.
Karthikeyan Ravishankar
Security Analyst at CSW
Organizations transitioning to Windows 11/Server 2022 are goldmines for zero-day attacks. Especially, Windows 11's Android subsystem can act as the initial attack vector for threat actors. This, combined with the work-from-home situation, is a recipe for disaster.
Sanjay Rameshkumar
Security Analyst at CSW
State-sponsored threat actors and crypto-savvy threat actors would be a new danger. The governmental and private sector organizations must adopt higher security standards to avoid this new dynamic.
Ghouse Syed
Security Analyst at CSW
Cyber threats related to Metaverse can increase as it gives cybercriminals a new environment to use their old scams.
Vaishnavi Saravanan
Security Analyst at CSW
It is an era where organizations are shifting from on-premises software to the cloud. Cloud services have been emerging with greater demand; it is recommended to enhance the security of cloud endpoints with advanced authentication and security information and event management (SIEM) deployments.
Prakash Ram Gopalakrishnan
Security Analyst at CSW
With more people preferring to continue working from home, an attack on any device connected to the home network can infect all devices on the network, thereby posing a threat to the organization's privacy and security.
Janani Senthilkumar
Security Analyst at CSW
Continuous monitoring of updates and patches for third-party software integrations in the network is recommended. Security-related measures and comprehensive periodical analyses of an organization's network will be inevitable going forward, irrespective of how secure the organization's network infrastructure is built, as new threats and ransomware are evolving.
Chuck Brooks
Cyber Security Expert and Forbes Contributor
Catalyzed by the Zero Trust strategy government mandate, Public Private Partnerships (PPP) will greatly expand throughout the cybersecurity ecosystem in 2022. Open collaboration, threat sharing, and cooperative research and development will help spur innovation and facilitate new cybersecurity solutions. PPP will be perceived good news for both industry and government by 2023.
Aviral Verma
Security Analyst at CSW
Supply chain attacks will be the primary weapon of choice in the ransomware threat arsenal. The year 2021 witnessed several types of malware distributed in supply chain attacks reconfigured as ransomware loaders. SolarWinds could merely have been the infancy of this form of assault.
Emilio Iasiello
Cyber Intelligence Consultant
The more established ransomware operators and gangs will continue to shift tactics again to evade detection. Ransomware gangs will likely continue to shy away from critical infrastructure targets to avoid making themselves a target of nation-state military and intelligence units.
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Srinivas Mukkamala
Senior Vice President, Security Products at Ivanti
In 2022, we will consistently see ransomware moving up the technology stack. In particular, APIs are the future of hyper data transfer between systems, and ransomware is after data. It is not long before ransomware groups target APIs via misconfigurations in code.
Shivanath Somanathan
Product and Cybersecurity Expert, Board and VC Advisor
The future will see the inclusion of trusted cybersecurity advisors in organizations’ boards of directors, either as independent technical experts or through sub-committee provisions to improve oversight of the cybersecurity posture of digital ecosystems, which businesses will thrive on.
Daniel Raj
Security Analyst at CSW
Patching vulnerabilities on demand will gain traction as a trend and an important skill for organizations with digital/physical attack surfaces, as vulnerabilities are being weaponized and cybersecurity leaders spotlight and take vigilance to protect from evolving cyber threats and attackers.
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.
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.
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.
Arjun Basnet
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.
Vengatesh
Technical Project Manager - CSW
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.
Satish Bhagavatula
CTO | Engineering, Technology & DevOps Leader
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Wai Kit Cheah
Director, Security Practice at Lumen Technologies
When companies struggle with managing their expenses, IT departments will often be neglected and likely targeted for cost reduction. Many executives could fail to realize that cybersecurity is not just about reinforcing the perimeter. There are zero-day exploits and critical vulnerabilities that could put our common enterprise applications, systems, and networks at risk.
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.
Prof John Walker
OSINT, Investigations and Cybersecurity Specialist
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.
George Do
Chief Information Security Officer at Gojek
I foresee in 2022 that China will increase the severity and frequency of cyber attacks against the US. I expect the delisting of Chinese companies in 2022 on NYSE/NASDAQ that will add to the global drama. The international relations between the superpowers has already deteriorated to a new low and will continue to fracture.
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.
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.
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.”
