As such, it’s in your business’s best interest to update your cybersecurity strategy. Here, it’s vital to familiarize yourself with the cybersecurity predictions expected to prevail this 2022. Read this article to learn about 10 of the most relevant tech forecasts from experts.
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10 Cyber Security Predictions for 2022 and Beyond
Deepfakes
Deepfakes are photoshopped videos, pictures, or audio that can put words in a politician or celebrity’s mouth or trick people into thinking that an event occurred. It uses AI to impersonate people and conduct frauds, social engineering attacks (fooling employees that they are receiving audio instructions from a trusted authority), blackmails, and scams.
This 2022, deepfakes are expected to threaten organizations through business email compromise (BEC) fraud, know your customer (KYC) ID verification, and loopholes in multifactor authentication. Its spread is further highlighted, with threat actors setting their eyes on monetizing deepfakes through a service that empowers less-skilled hackers to leverage the technology in exchange for a fee.
National Elections
National election campaigns are susceptible to cybercrime due to multiple reasons. For one, foreign actors may want to discredit the democracy and electing system of a nation, resulting in numerous negative ramifications to the economy.
Attackers may also earn a lot of money by disabling your device, phishing for sensitive data, embedding shutdown systems on government computers, modifying votes, or disabling an account’s voting capacity. They would then require ransom before reactivating the compromised system.
Ransomware
Ransomware is one of the most common cyber attacks due to its lucrative nature. It primarily targets industries related to safety and health. However, all businesses are vulnerable. Especially with remote work, extortionists have gotten to know enterprises more. Thus, new and unique tactics will arise, with more aggressive counter-negotiating strategies.
The most common ransomware threats use distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and the convergence of operational technology (OT) and IT. The good news is that with the rise in ransomware, there is also an increase in companies conducting awareness campaigns against cyberattacks.
Shift to Zero-Trust Model
As companies incorporate a WFH model into their workplace culture, the trust ascribed to the devices of internal users and employees are minimal. This brings about the verification of systems and resources before connecting to anything.
The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) concept, insufficiency of virtual private network (VPN) technology for companies, use of cloud services, and increased preference for mobile devices—all these show the shift of enterprises to the zero-trust model.
A significant aspect of this framework should be optimizing encryption technology, which will allow businesses to verify identities and devalue sensitive data through micro-segmented tokenization.
Insider Breach
Insider attacks primarily target large organizations, extracting sensitive data from them. With internal breaches, companies can suffer from heavy financial damages. Their hefty cost can sometimes even exceed those of nation or state-wide cybercrimes.
An enterprise would not usually admit to insider breaches because that could ruin their brand reputation and make them legally liable. For this reason, cases of insider breach are frequently overlooked and given less significance than ransomware and other external threats, when in reality, insider breaches are just as damaging.
IoT and OT/IT Convergence
Given how industries incorporate the internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) in their system, digital connectivity is more vital now than ever. This increased connectivity further widens the opportunities and vectors for cybercriminals to attack. The complexity of IoT highlights cyber risk and the insufficient visibility to identify compromised devices.
Besides these integrations, the more profound understanding of hackers in the control system of industries and the OT’s lack of reliable protection against cybercrimes make companies vulnerable to weaponized malware and other types of hacks.
Critical Infrastructure
A significant aspect of communication and connectivity is satellite relays and monitoring. With satellites, communicating from different locations is more feasible. It makes data transfer possible globally via the cloud.
However, along with its prevalence is an increase in cyber risk. Satellites may be targeted with cyber-attacks that disrupt networks. There may also be exploiters that are capable of damaging space infrastructure.
API Attacks
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are valuable in developing apps and increasing productivity. However, they may have frequently overlooked connectors in certain applications. APIs are difficult to secure given their internal- and external-facing nature. Thus, cybercriminals find ways to leverage unprotected APIs to access sensitive data, establish vulnerabilities among common web apps, spread DDoS attacks, and inject SQL.
Enterprise-Level Home Security
With the rapid changes in workplace structures and remote work environments, there’s a greater need for companies to secure data even on home networks. Since more employees are working remotely, attack surfaces are growing exponentially.
Thus, organizations should reconsider their long-term strategies on how to secure diverse and distributed environments. Cyber security software is no longer enough for data privacy, and assessing each employee’s network is crucial.
Limited Cyber Insurance
Nowadays, cyber insurance is harder to get because of the increased cases of ransomware threats. Insurance companies realize the mismatch between the risks they have to make and the premiums they collect from their clients. As a result, insurance providers may be compelled to limit their number of clients, be more meticulous with the insurance contracts, and be selective with each company they do business with.
Consequently, organizations must ramp up their investments in cybersecurity, adapt automated solutions that adjust to various dynamic threats, and pay a significantly higher premium to better compensate insurance companies.
In Closing
Digital transformation and the expanding online audience have increased the risk of companies to cybercrime. The threats expected to prevail this 2022 are aggressive, adept, and continuously changing – defined by new tactics and more elaborate cybercrime schemes. The increased possibility of vector surfaces as an entry for hackers makes deepfakes, ransomware, and other similar attacks more challenging to mitigate.
To prevent being victimized by cyber-attacks, remember to be vigilant. Always stay up-to-date on the latest news on cybersecurity. Everyone, not just tech-savvy people, should be more aware of what is happening in the cyberworld.
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