Cyber Security In 2021 - Predictions & Trends
Uploaded on 2020-12-30 in NEWS-News Analysis, FREE TO VIEW
While 2020 has dominated by the Coronavirus, the impact of global warming and the constant growth in severity of cyber attacks, it seems that every passing year gets worse for cyber security. Improved cyber defences are being matched at every step by the increasing sophistication of hackers and other cyber criminals.. We hope that 2020 turns out to have ben an exceptional year and that the spike in cyber crime that sought to exploit the Coronavirus crisis and disrupt remote working will not be repeated.
A recent Report from PwC found that cyber security is more business-critical than ever before. They say that 96% of executives have shifted their cyber security strategy due to Covid-19 and 40% of executives say they are accelerating digitisation. Around 55% of enterprise executives plan to increase their cyber security budgets in 2021 and 51% are adding full-time cyber staff in 2021. PwC found that most executives are planning to ramp up their cybersecurity spending in 2021 despite the majority of them, 64%, expecting business revenues to decline.
What is truly shocking is PWC's finding that 25% of organisations are actually planning to downsize their cyber budgets in the forthcoming 12 months
Recent news that Russian state-sponsored hackers have for a year or more working on using the weak aspects of SolarWinds management software to hack into major US and other government federal agencies and corporations. After Donals Trump's presidential terms and four years of deference toward Russia, the Biden Administration will likely respond with renewed sanctions and retaliatory attacks for the SolarWinds hack. The challenge for the Biden Administration will be to respond strongly enough to deter future attacks, without triggering an escalation into cyber warfare. A much stronger cyber security focus from the new US administration can be expected, although simply cleaning up the mess from the SolarWinds attack will take time as cyber attackers will have left tripwires behind them inside the hacked networks.
Companies will be forced to take nation-state actors more seriously after about 18,000 were exposed in the SolarWinds attack .
Many employees will continue to work remotely, far more than they used to and security teams will still need to worry much more about securing remote connections.
Zero Trust - It makes sense that access to networks, applications and data be as limited as possible, so expect zero trust capabilities to begin to show up in every kind of access product. That will help greatly in cases of stolen credentials and could also help prevent lateral movement across networks. a Zero trust regime can also replace or supplement VPNs, plugging vulnerabilities there. But zero trust won’t do much if those applications and networks have vulnerabilities, so things like patch management, configuration and threat detection will still matter.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) - is a broader technology that encompasses zero trust and will also see greater adoption as external users and Internet of Things devices continue to drive growth in edge computing.
Leaking Cloud Buckets - The explosion in remote work led to acceleration in digital business transformation and application migrations to the cloud. Along with that rush will come the inevitable cloud bucket misconfigurations and security breaches. CompariTech have estimated that 6% of Google Cloud buckets are vulnerable due to misconfiguration and both AWS and Microsoft's Azure users have their vulnerabilities too. Expect billions of sensitive records to be exposed again this year because of user error in the cloud.
Ransomware - Just gets worse every year, and 2021 will be no exception. Sophos predicts that the big ransomware families will become “more evasive and nation-state-like in sophistication,” targeting larger companies with multimillion-dollar ransom demands, and ransomware-as-a-service will continue to let smaller players wreak havoc with everyone else. Expect to hear a lot more about ransomware names such as Ryuk, RagnarLocker, Netwalker, REvil, Egregor/Maze, Dharma and Buer Loader.
The latest threats always generate headlines, but it’s the ones everyone already knows about that do most of the damage and 2021 will be no different.
So-called Commodity Malware such as loaders and botnets and human-operated Initial Access Brokers can do more damage than might appear. According to Sophos, “Such threats can seem like low-level malware noise, but they are designed to secure a foothold in a target, gather essential data and share data back to a command-and-control network that will provide further instructions,.. If human operators are behind these types of threats, they’ll review every compromised machine for its geolocation and other signs of high value, and then sell access to the most lucrative targets to the highest bidder, such as a major ransomware operation.”
The impact of the Coronavirus pandemic should reduce as effective vaccines are produced and distributed and as the impact of the pandemic subsides, there should be an economic recovery and more money to invest in cyber security training and tools for overwhelmed emplyees.
2021 Security Industry Trends
Here is a selection of the major trends that across a large number of cyber security industry forecasts:
- There will be huge security impacts in the coming year from the move to work from home (WFH) fueled by COVID-19. More attacks will occur on home computers and networks, with bad actors even using home offices as criminal hubs by taking advantage of unpatched systems and architecture weaknesses.
- The rush to cloud-everything will cause many security holes, challenges, misconfigurations and outages.
- More growth in the security industry. Our numbers of new products and new year mergers and acquisitions will cause network complexity issues and integration problems and overwhelm cyber teams.
- Privacy will be a mess, with user revolts, new laws, confusion and self-regulation failing.
- Identity and multi-factor authentication (MFA) will take center stage as passwords (finally) start to go away in a tipping-point year.
- Many high-profile Internet of Thing (IoT) hacks, some which will make headline news.
- Ransomware will get worse and worse — with new twists, data stealing prior to encryption, malware packaging with other threats and very specific targeting of organizations.
- Lots of 5G vulnerabilities will become headline news as the technology grows.
- Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) attacks will be widely available from criminal networks. The dark web will allow criminals to buy access into more sensitive corporate networks.
- Mobile devices, including smart-phones, will be attacked in new ways, including app stores.
- Crypto-currencies will play new roles, with criminals switching often for hiding advantages.
- As digital transformation projects grow, many plans will implode as security challenges mount.
Putting off your organisation’s total digital transformation is no longer an option and nd a greater urgency to adopt the cloud will spur innovation, improve overall security, and help future-proof enterprises in the face of uncertain market conditions.
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