“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” is a quote attributed to the famous baseball player and coach Yogi Berra. It is, therefore, with much humility; I am attempting to take a stab at what 2022 holds for us in terms of the cybersecurity landscape.
Supply chain attacks will hog the limelight as the single biggest cybersecurity threat. It seems that the attackers are keen to create a multiplier effect by bringing down elements of the enterprise supply chain. For example, exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in widely used software allows them to impact several customers in one go. Recently SolarWinds and Kaseya attacks are examples of such attacks.
Attacks on critical infrastructure are likely to gain prominence. OEM-dependent closed systems, lack of understanding of operation technology, and poorly implemented security controls make attacks on critical infrastructure a ripe target. The recent attack on the Colonial pipeline, the power grid outage that brought the city of Mumbai to a halt, or an attempted attack on a water treatment plant in Florida, portend ominous signs for the times to come.
Attacks on the healthcare sector, the criticality of the industry in COVID times present an opportunity for attackers to create significant disruption. The consensus opinion is that COVID and its variants will continue to be a problem for a considerable part of 2022. Companies that are part of the value chain, like hospitals, pharmacies, pharma companies, vaccine manufacturers, etc., have already seen a disproportionately high number of attacks this year. They will continue to suffer in 2022 as well.
State-sponsored cyber warfare will see a significant increase driven in part by the current turbulent geopolitical situation. The attempt to influence election outcomes using social media channels is already well documented; nation-states can also expect to showcase their cyber warfare technology superiority to create a deterrent. Under President Biden, the US government (and so have other nations) has already launched an initiative to beef up its cybersecurity preparedness across all major industry segments.
Governments will try to out-legislate themselves to respond to cyber threats, albeit in knee jerk fashion, probably causing more fear and confusion instead of confidence. This will result in higher regulatory compliance needs as more and more industries are brought under the compliance ambit and, in process, increasing the cost of compliance for enterprises.
Artificial Intelligence/ Deep Learning/ Machine Learning technologies have now been leveraged by cybersecurity technology providers for 2-3 years. Access to better quality data, cheap computing, and stabilization of algorithms has increased the trust of the cybersecurity industry in the ability of these technologies to not only for threat detection but also threat response. We can see increased use of AI across various layers of security from user access, endpoint & network security, and enterprise-wide threat detection.
Cloud vulnerability will continue to dominate security conversations. Pre-COVID cloud was seen as an ancillary to an organization’s infrastructure strategy and embraced sparingly. Enterprises of all sizes and verticals have been forced to adopt the cloud as an effective way to make their infrastructure accessible for remote workers. Most of these enterprises have a minimal understanding of the underlying security needs, leaving them exposed big time for credential hijacking, data theft, and ransomware attacks.
Lack of cyber security skills will continue to hamper the industry’s ability to respond to threats, increasing dependence on service providers to bridge the gap and increasing companies’ cost and complexity.
Increased frustration with the cybersecurity landscape. The combination of an increased digital footprint, leading to higher cyber risk and commensurate compliance requirements, is a vicious cycle that keeps CEOs up at night. The issue, therefore, invariably finds mention during the majority of board conversations today. However, speak to any CEO, and one hears a familiar grouse that despite spending significant money on complicated three-letter acronym products, I don’t get an answer to a simple question, Am I secure? Therefore, the cybersecurity community needs to find ways to stay relevant to its customers as they undergo their respective transformations to remain competitive in their marketplaces. As a community, it needs to be our endeavor to help our customers answer three simple questions, i.e., Am I secured? Am I compliant, and is my brand reputation at risk?
