Examining Today’s Cybersecurity to Prepare for 2022

The past few years have been nothing if not tumultuous for businesses of all shapes and sizes, which has only exacerbated the shifting terrain we’d expect to see in a business’ cybersecurity needs and threats. Let’s take a few moments to examine what 2022’s cybersecurity landscape is likely to look like, considering what we’ve seen recently.

Prediction: Attacks Will Shift in Method and Severity

The recent rise in remote and hybrid work may have allowed those businesses able to support it to get by relatively well over the past few months, but this approach did not come without its tradeoffs.

Remote Work Has Increased the Attack Surface

While working out of the office has helped to protect the health and safety of your business’ employees, the same can’t really be said regarding the technology your employees are using to do their work. With home networks now hosting more work resources than ever before, attackers can now take advantage of the inherent weaknesses that these networks have. Increased diligence and awareness of cybersecurity best practices within households will be increasingly crucial as time passes.

This is exacerbated when you consider how diverse the attack surface becomes on a home network, compared to that of the office. By attacking another smart device in the home, a cybercriminal can find a relatively unsecured access point to the rest of the network.

Hackers Will Do Their Homework

On top of this increased diversity in attack surface, we can also expect hackers to spend more time seeking out vulnerabilities and new methods of attack to use on their victims. Software development isn’t a perfect process, so with every new program or even update, there is the risk that a new vulnerability will be introduced and add to the potential of a zero-day attack (one where the vulnerability is taken advantage of before the “good guys” realize it’s there).

On a related note, attackers will also continue to seek out ways to use new and developing technologies to their own advantage. Deepfake technology is a great example of this, as its increased accessibility could make it a viable threat against some forms of identity authentication.

Prediction: Attacks Will Change Their Targets

Experts also anticipate that breaches will diversify in what they actually target as well, with the largest breaches next year impacting the cryptocurrency space. Despite this, we would be utterly surprised if this shift resulted in any less danger to business resources, so businesses everywhere will need to continue securing themselves appropriately.

Prediction: Attacks Will Still Rely on Familiar Methods

Unfortunately, a lot of cybersecurity vulnerabilities come from the same mistakes being repeated as applications and other software is in development. Keeping systems updated so that these vulnerabilities can be resolved will remain a huge part of keeping a business’ technology secure.

Attacks On End Users Will Continue

Finally, we can effectively guarantee that phishing and other cybercriminal strategies that target the end user will remain popular as time passes… particularly if people continue to work from home, away from the culture of cybersecurity awareness that the office should be perpetuating. Educating your users about these risks and periodically evaluating their awareness and preparedness will be key to preventing the lion’s share of such attacks from coming to fruition.

As much as we’d like to claim that we can see the future, we can’t… although our job would be much easier if we could. What we can do, however, is ensure that your business is as prepared as possible to deal with any threat it may face—and that’s just what we will do. Give us a call at (978) 482-2020 to find out more about the security we can provide to your organization.