At the dawn of 2022, with the attack landscape scaling up, the cybersecurity community faces yet new challenges and questions to answer. To outline several crucial ones that have been keeping us busy:
- Which threats will persist and which can be considered left behind?
- What are the key cybersecurity trends to tune into?
- What areas call for particular attention of cybersecurity professionals?
- What security loopholes are to be exploited most in 2022?
In our overly fast-paced environment, the pressure on all the industries to get the up-and-coming cybersecurity trends right and live up to demanding standards of the field is enormous. The questions above loom so large that they have to be attended to timely. With SOC Prime’s Detection as Code platform for collaborative cyber defense, threat hunting, and discovery that integrates with 20+ SIEM and XDR platforms, your threat detection is easier, faster, and far more efficient. To kick-start acquiring new heights in the detection process in 2022, opt for a perfect evergreen solution – an online Sigma translation engine Uncoder.IO, designed to instantly convert threat detection rules into 20+ most used formats.
The new realities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are playing out across all fields of the security ecosystem, setting new rules and regimes, and it has never been so vital to keep up. This article is a roadmap for what to look for in the cybersecurity field in 2022 to equip the organization’s CISOs, InfoSec Managers or Leads, and other executives to stay on top of their game.
1. Remote Work-Induced Cybersecurity Risks
Over the past few years, remote work has grown into an indispensable employment model for many businesses across the globe – and we see that it is here to stay. Even though many organizations have managed to hold a positive promise in terms of cyber risks mitigation for their distributed workforces, the unfortunate trend is for security vetting to severely lose in its rigorousness.
Such factors as the use of personal devices, insufficient security practices including poorly organized access management, and lacking awareness are breaching security boundaries. This is the reality one cannot flow around; however, there are efficient ways to gear yourself or your staff up with the best security practices. First and foremost, cybersecurity education and awareness. It is vital to ensure that everyone is properly trained to avoid precarious working conditions. Up-to-date knowledge and skills form a solid armor against cybercrime instances, helping to detect, report, and reduce security violations effectively. The importance of top-tier resources in today’s sea of information, especially those that cater to the needs of professionals of all levels, cannot be underestimated. With SOC Prime’s Cyber Library, cyber heads who are new to the field, as well as more seasoned experts, can hone their SIEM hard skills with direct access to free cybersecurity knowledge. Remember: people are both the best defense against and the easiest target of cyberattacks. To top that, in 2021, there has been an uptick in social engineering attacks, and there are all the reasons to predict that this tendency will persist.
2. Ransomware Becomes Front and Center
It is time to admit the fact that ransomware is one of the most lucrative (for cybercriminals) threats, and it has been on a continued rise since the beginning of the pandemic. Ransomware offenses disrupt processes, productivity, reputation, as well as inflict severe financial damage. 2021 brought about new sophisticated ways to deploy ransomware, enabling attackers to considerably expand their reach. Digitalization produces new targets for extortion, increasing its scale and volume. There are numerous entry vectors into victims’ devices, and if successfully planted, the malware used for demanding ransom costs businesses serious disruptions and multi-million losses.
3. Identity-First Security
User credentials are not enough. It is not safe to rely on error-prone processes that create many blind spots and security holes for threat actors to exploit. Malware masquerading, impersonation, and certificate-related attacks are just a few examples of adversaries abusing identity and access management to skirt past security defenses.
The trend of setting identity as the key security factor has been cemented by novel practices of remote work and the migration to cloud services. Identity-first security isn’t a new concept, but it’s gaining traction as hackers target identity and access management systems in order to obtain stealthy persistence.
Wrapping Up
In sum, we live in times when keeping one’s finger on the pulse of cybersecurity trends and novelties and timely responding to them is what makes the difference between success and failure in cybersecurity. In 2022, the human factor in cyber-attacks is getting under the spotlight as never before – and this is a bad news/good news scenario. Good – users hold a massive impact on the situation. Bad (bet you’ve already guessed it) – here applies that same rule used to describe the good side of things. Let’s ensure the lessons learned in 2021 stay with us to improve the cybersecurity outcomes for 2022.
