2021 is proofing to be a different year than any other as cybersecurity is concerned. We are comfortable working from home, thanks to the covid-19 pandemic, which has forced companies and organizations to adopt new ways of working virtually. Due to changes in the way we work, cybersecurity has also continued to face changes too. Cyber-threats have shifted and focused on mobile endpoints and other ways too. All these have made the cybersecurity budget in 2021 climb higher due to changes that have been implemented in the CISO’s budget and cybersecurity priorities like authentication, cloud protection, and application monitoring. Even though we expect more impact, there is just but a beginning of shift and changes that are continuing to be witnessed this year.
Cyber threats and attacks are now happening at home
Yes, the focus now is fully at home. 2020 has changed the way we viewed cybersecurity, working from home has shifted our compass and directed it towards working from home security. There is a need for a rethinking of new ways on how to safeguard everyone who will continue working from home. Cloud services and digital collaborative tools that support online and virtual working like Zoom, Slack, and Skype are now among the tools that need cybersecurity to continue to be secure and enable them to give services. All these tools continue to cause a great impact on work-from-home.
2021 is not different, actually from the research contacted by Skybox, shows that over 70 percent of organizations will continue with work-from-home tactics because it has proved to be working. Over a third of their workforce would remain remote in the coming year and a half. What does this mean, there is a need for endpoint protection in the years to come. Endpoint means that there is a need for protection for someone who is working from home. Protection is needed for him to be able to work comfortably from the comfort of a bed with fear of cyber-attack. From the same report, it indicated that endpoint protection would affect 55 percent of the IT team because companies continue deploying assets remotely and they will be looking for protection as they also purchase the same.
Bitdefender researchers also have noted that remote working will become a major focus for many organizations. Working from home or remote working should not be taken lightly as it presents a unique set of opportunities for hackers and other bad people who take advantage of situations. Insufficient cybersecurity for work from home people and other remote users is very dangerous. Employees have continued to take cybersecurity shortcuts for convenience, making personal devices like laptops, hard disks, removable devices, routers, and switches to be at risk. Insufficient security when remotely working puts the transfer of sensitive information at risk when is transferred over unsecured or unsanctioned channels like instant messaging apps. Personal e-mail addresses and other platforms that gather people’s information to be used by hackers. Lack of cybersecurity or putting insufficient security is a major issue in remote working, it opens loopholes for data breaches and leaks.
Staff’s behavior
Most cyber-attacks are caused by employee’s activities that jeopardize security. Forrester researchers’ remote working is helping in the increase of insider threats. In their explanation, they have highlighted that 25 percent of data breaches are connected to insider threats and expectations are high that this will continue to increase up to 33 percent by the end of 2021. There are speculations by Forcepoint that in this year (2021) we will witness the growth of the “insider-as-a-service” model that is going to offer a highly targeted means for bad actors to be trusted so that they can help in gathering information about sensitive IP. They will be able to undercover agents who pass the interview process to become part of the team.
Automation Threat
Remote working is helping in making such technology like automation receive a major boost. But there is a need to even boost cybersecurity to a higher notch because researchers are warning of an increase in spear-phishing attacks due to automation. Hackers and cybercriminals have created tools that can automate the manual aspects of spear phishing to increase the volumes of spear phishing in email attacks helping them to improve their phishing success rate.
Need for security in cloud services
As remote working continues to grow, cloud services are also increasing because are the ones, which are making work-at-home become reality. Budget allocation for cloud security will keep growing as companies continue to protect their cloud services. Besides, Gartner’s analysis indicates that distributed cloud is the future of the business world. Distributed cloud is simply business processes migrating to the public and private cloud, or else hybrid cloud. This shift will be able to drive Cloud security posture management (CSPM) to help in finding network connectivity misconfigurations, able to assess data risk, detecting unauthorized permissions, help in cloud monitoring, and many more.