Cyberattacks were on the rise in 2021, as was the level of sophistication of these attacks. Bad actors used automated tools, social engineering, and compromised endpoints to their advantage; ransomware has become a common weapon of choice for crime rings.
In fact, at least one large North American financial institution reported that its customers went from facing a handful of ransomware attacks a year in 2019 to seeing multiple attacks weekly. While financial gain is a common goal of these attacks, it is not the only reason for cybercrime. Some attacks are launched with widespread macroeconomic disruption as one of the top goals.
C-suites and governments across the world are prioritizing cybersecurity and incident response strategies to combat the increased sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks.
Aite-Novarica Group sees ten trends shaping the course of cybersecurity in 2022. Some of these trends include:
- Ransomware will become the weapon of choice for key cyber aggressors. Nation-state attackers are going to continue investing money and time into building up their ransomware capabilities. Their platforms will continue to grow in sophistication, and these bad actors will look for more threat vectors that can be used to target financial institutions. Vulnerabilities in third- and fourth-party service providers will be exploited to keep weakening the security infrastructure of financial institutions.
- DataSecOps will become real. DataSecOps will become a strong contender for data privacy, evolving from a niche technology in the field of data protection. Market positioning efforts will give way to privacy managers and chief information security officers actually investing in DataSecOps. It will become a must-have in the cloud security market, especially for large cloud-computing deployments.
- Zero-trust deployment will gain ground. Zero-trust architecture requires every endpoint, no matter if it is inside or outside a particular network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated. This year, organizations will invest more in zero-trust technology to keep themselves secure.
- Aggressive acquisitions will help grow the managed security service provider (MSSP) market. With the MSSP market nearing saturation of their prime total addressable market, providers will need to differentiate themselves more and more to keep customers and lure customers from other MSSPs. Providers will look to boost their security service offerings by engaging in M&A activity in this area.
To learn more about these four trends and the other six Aite-Novarica Group has identified for 2022, read the full report Top 10 Trends in Cybersecurity, 2022: Combating Industrialized Cybercrime Attacks. You can also tune into the recording of the webinar my colleague Mitch Wein and I hosted on January 20th here.
