2020 was a year like never before. We all witnessed the twists and turns in our lives. It did have a torrential impact on the cyber security ecosystem too. Although everyone quickly adapted to the new world and embraced the use of technology to work from home, but deep down it meant there was a whole new attack to be guarded against- inadequate preparedness. This led to the paradigm shift from the highly forecasted AI and ML taking precedence whereas it was cloud migration or computing taking the top priority.With such a shift, 2021 brings hopes and new beginnings to organisations looking to re-model to the new way of working and adapting to the current solutions. Listed here are few technological aspects which will take primacy over the workforce ecosystems: -
- **Cloud Readiness backed with AI/ML:**Organizations moved to the cloud in the past year due to technological market urge. This trend will continue combined with AI & ML in order to be future ready for situations like remote working for their staff. This combination provides the bandwidth and the visibility to identify frauds early and avoid any unforeseen breaches.
- **DevOps with Security with Automation and Chaos Engineering:**Ponemon Research Institute states (ibm.biz/BdfHVU) Vulnerabilities in third-party software constitutes 16% of the breaches which in turn leads us to fixing the bugs early and testing the software for third party libraries. At the same time, failures with the systems due to any reason can be troublesome for an organization. This means automating the tasks and performing the Chaos Engineering can help organizations resolve the issues quicker.
- **Identities along with Data Privacy:**Phishing emails and credential stuffing have led to huge losses like the Capital One cyber incident was the biggest data breach of 2019, as it exposed the personal data of approximately 100 million consumers in the United States. Ponemon Institute 2020 Research (ibm.biz/BdfHVU) analysis of the attack vectors revealed that most prominent ones were compromised credentials (19% of malicious breaches). Recent trends also shown users’ data being shared without their consent proving the relevance of data privacy laws like California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and many others. While these were enacted, data privacy is still a major concern. Therefore, organizations will see identities as the new perimeter.
- Threat Intelligence for a safer ecosystem: Ponemon Research Institute (ibm.biz/BdfHVU) highlights 52% of data breaches in 2020 were caused by malicious attacks: Travelex was attacked on New Year’s Eve where the hackers allegedly demanded a $6 million ransom. Different kinds of malwares and ransomware like Crypto Ransomware, Locker Ransomware or Doxware were leveraged to perform these attacks. Hence applying the right threat intelligence into the cyber ecosystem is the need of the hour.
- **Supply Chain Management:**Towards the end of 2020, supply chain attack trojanizing SolarWinds Orion business software updates in order to distribute malware was a major wake up alarm. This meant a minor change unnoticed can create huge losses and concern.
To summarize, 2021 is going to be the era of strong Zero Trust Architecture combined with AI and ML as a silver lining to the cloudy ecosystem that will help identify and detect frauds & breaches even before the intrusion happens.