5 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch in 2022

For this week’s Tuesday Tech Tip. We’re going to talk about the 5 biggest cybersecurity trends that are expected in 2022 as it relates to cybercriminals.

The first cybersecurity trend to watch for is cybercriminals are going to be focusing on cloud assets. And what I mean is the Azure cloud platform. It might be where you have your servers, camera systems, your email systems like Office 365, or even your phone systems. There’s going to be a lot of focus on the cloud environment because everyone is moving to the cloud. It’s a target-rich environment and there’s going to be an expected uptick in cybercrime in that area.

Second, there’s going to be a focus by cybercriminals on hitting areas of the supply chain. If a cybercriminal can infect, for example. Ransomware, into a much-needed component of a supply chain, they’re going to get a greater return on investment. There will be higher actual monetary demands put on things because they recognize that it doesn’t just affect the one company, but the entire supply chain.

The third cybersecurity trend to watch out for is Ransomware as a Service (RaaS). Ultimately it’s where bad actors with ill intent can go out and hire other companies to perform ransomware attacks. They call it Ransomware as a Service or also being referred to as modern ransomware. It’s where the actual entity or bad actor, that’s going to supply a list of users, passwords, data, or targets, is different than the actual entity that is going to be executing the actual ransomware. There’s a lot of legs and talk on that, and it’s going to be something that we’re going to see more and more of in 2022.

 The fourth trend we’re looking at is actual automobiles. There is a big amount of data or chatter that is out there amongst the bad actors where they are talking about compromising the connected car. I don’t want to go too deep into that because there are a lot of ways that they could hurt us even just to make us have a wreck. there’s going to be a lot of focus on those cars that are connected to the Internet. Being able to exploit where people go a, what time they go, and a lot more information can be taken. As well as actually taking away some of the automobiles controls at an inopportune time and causing an accident just to muck up the system, if you will.

And finally, number five is the zero-day and known vulnerabilities. This is something that is a brand new threat that doesn’t have a solution for it is what’s called a zero-day threat. these are difficult to block because there’s a hole in a particular application or software and there is not a fix for it yet. That’s one thing, but the troubling part is the known vulnerabilities. Most of the time these successful breaches are taking place on known vulnerabilities that IT guys like me, need to be very diligent in our look at what we’re doing because it’s a known threat. It’s something that has been out days, weeks, months. This means there is a patch for it and they are not applying the patch, not applying the fix.

So a lot of scary stuff really for this year I’ll throw in there that cyber liability insurance. The parameters are the amount of information and the amount of security that is rising to get cyber security. If you don’t have it, you want to get it and you don’t want to have a breach because if you do, it’s going to be very difficult to get cyber liability insurance to get someone to pick up that risk for you.

I hope this is helpful as always. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d be happy to expand upon these things and show you very practical ways that a smaller mid-size company can protect itself from these upcoming risks.