Cybersecurity trends that will change 2022
Nation-state actors will continue to prepare the battlefield for future action.
“Sometimes an attack against critical infrastructure is deployed to cause an immediate effect, but sometimes the attack is carried out simply to leave behind code which may prove useful to the adversary in the future. Nation-states are not petty thieves rattling door handles as they walk around. They are canny and deliberate and are thinking about long-term gain, not short-term disruption,” said Ben Smith, CTO, Netwitness. “Data residency will continue to be an important component at the national level worldwide. Regardless of your corporate size, if you are charged with securing your global organization, be thinking about your own architecture and where the data is collected, where it lives, and where it is handled – these may be three different jurisdictions. The flexibility of your current architecture will become even more important as new privacy regulations are passed and enforced.”
Social media and Ransomware attacks will evolve
“Most stories about cyberattacks leading to kinetic (or physical) outcomes tend to focus on things like car hacking, medical device compromises, and other stunt-hacking proofs-of-concept. But it is today’s social media platforms which represent the biggest, cheapest, and fastest method for an adversary to effect change in the physical world – not by destroying equipment as part of a cyberattack, but in mobilizing humans towards the adversary’s goals. Disinformation, and its skillful development and deployment, will produce real-world physical effects,” said Smith. “The “double-extortion” model, where your data is encrypted and the adversary simultaneously threatens to release the data, will persist. Much as there has been every year, there will be new combinations of existing tactics, as attackers continue to innovate in how they run their own revenue-generating business operations for greatest efficiency. Attacks launched from locations not addressed by the US legal system will further complicate response efforts.”
Existing regulations will catch up with the pandemic.
“Many organizations scrambled to keep moving forward in the chaos that was early 2020, and there were shortcuts and other compromises in that compressed timeframe. Some companies found that their pre-pandemic architecture was built with assumptions about where data is typically handled – and with the remote workforce wave, these legacy data handling practices didn’t keep up with new geographies. What was previously not a compliance issue may be one today. Regulators will start to notice this and take action,” said Smith.
The cybersecurity skills gap will only widen.
“Despite the large number of educational programs and certifications designed to demonstrate proficiency as a cybersecurity professional, those numbers will be outstripped by the quantity of new jobs which must be filled. Smart organizations will relax their “perfect candidate” standards and widen the net to find good people. Do you really think that attackers have “the right security certifications” that you demand of your new hires?” said Smith.
