Top Cybersecurity Trends to Follow in 2021

We are facing a huge transformation on the digital front in 2020, damaging almost all the sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, services, trade, and many others. This transformation of digital technology has created an enormous impact on the protection value, which suggests that the safety of networks and knowledge are often effective within the future. Companies must consider massive changes when they head into the new year as they work to build and improve their cybersecurity risk control programs.

Cybersecurity has become a top priority for businesses because of the shift toward remote work and social distancing conditions for many industries. According to Fintech News, 80% of organizations across the world are expanding their digital security infrastructures. However, COVID-19 is responsible for an increase of 238% in cyberattacks in FinTech.

The pandemic in 2020 we saw has effectually proven a catalyst for the cybersecurity risk to rise exponentially, and all businesses are susceptible worldwide. Based on CSO Online the most common attack vectors in 2020, through email found 94% of malware delivered, and more than 80% of reported corporate security breaches with phishing attacks. The initial steps to structure a successful management program for cybersecurity risk is to have a strong knowledge of the risk landscape and understand how threats are advancing, changing, or growing in number.

As per most analysts, when an ever-increasing number of individuals adopt the work-from-home timetable due to the Covid pandemic, the workforce will take cybersecurity routes for ease. The systems that we have for our utilization and routers installed in our homes not ensure protection by any means, so the confidential or individual data sent through these unstable or unsanctioned networks like apps for instant messaging, email addresses, and cloud-based document processors) can play a major role in security vulnerabilities and leaks.

Considerations About Cybersecurity for 2021

Businesses encounter various types of difficulties caused by unforeseen incidents as we faced COVID-19. For the revolution of digitalization, quickened methodologies have guaranteed that numerous organizations have developed effective and proper innovations to extend the profitability of the business. Simultaneously, the fast obtaining and execution of these advancements implied that the time taken to work in deep due diligence was lacking in numerous businesses. For 2021, the projections and patterns and below must be remembered by IT specialists and CISOs for cybersecurity:

Ransomware Cyberattack Threats

The unfortunate truth of COVID-19 is the world's constantly rising unemployment. It has raised doubt about the distribution of wealth, and hackers do their best by cyberattacks to wreck corporate institutions. Details from 99 companies show that seventy-one percent of violations have been reported in 2020, with fifty-two percent comprising hands-on hacking and malware was not autonomous.

Teaching the staff how to manage files and emails from unknown channels is a great approach to a secure work environment. Mishandled data downloaded to the intranet of your company will inflict significant damage to your internal correspondence. It will also compromise the financial well-being of the business.

Zero-Trust Access to the Network

Zero-trust encryption means that not every user or system can be trusted. Instead, access rights are provided on an as-needed basis. Providing access depends on the individual job role of each employee. It efficiently reduces possible insider-attack risks. A zero-trust security framework helps organizations stop attackers from obtaining access to the network. It helps avoid users access sensitive information by regularly monitoring the trust of each device and user. The right protection of resources is not any longer adequate for the utilization of the "castle and moat" security process. It is mandatory to characterize the safety border around the individual or the framework trying to find access.

Increased Emphasis on Privacy

Because of the development of data collection and processing and the proliferation of emerging technologies, privacy-enhancing computing use would enable companies to exchange data securely in untrusted environments as they understand the increase in privacy issues. Three frameworks for privacy-upgrade with secured info being utilized are:

• Where classified data is stored, confidential computing provides a trusted environment.
• With privacy-aware machine learning, decentralized data mining, and analytics.
• Homomorphic encryption, a technique of cryptography that returns the owner of data with an encrypted effect, while accessing third parties and providing no details or results to manage information.

Computing that improves security causes companies to trade data and communicate productively across different areas while keeping up security and privacy. Most of the countries around the world are setting up protection laws and regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and more to protect critical data and client information. Organizations must counter these challenges and upgrade the need for compliance as these norms change and consumers become able to handle security.

The Architecture of Distributed Cloud

Distributed cloud architecture has been identified as the next phase of cloud computing by Gartner. It enables consumers to take advantage of cloud computing value propositions while also increasing the cloud range and use cases. Organizations will improve low-latency scenarios to comply with strict privacy rules by integrating the physical location of cloud-delivered services that require data to be stored in a particular location.

While functioning on a public cloud platform completely, businesses are reluctant to use clouds for private and public computing as a hybrid or combination. The hybrid cloud breaks the public cloud value propositions. The company maintains responsibility for its private cloud setting, although the full range of features provided by the public cloud service cannot be used, such as the innovation pace.

The public cloud corporation essentially maintains, runs, and evolves the resources and performs them physically at the point of need. Distributed cloud deals with low-latency situations, decrease the expense of storage and helps to meet privacy laws and policies that enable data to stay in a particular geographical area.

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Endpoint Security Management

The ability to centrally discover, acquire, deploy, modify, and troubleshoot endpoint devices within the enterprise is requested by remote workers and distributed devices demanding access to company properties. It is important to manage endpoints since these endpoints can be the access point for cybercriminals to corporate networks.

Endpoint security monitoring includes authenticating and controlling access rights to a network of different endpoint devices. These endpoints provide opportunities for cyber attackers to exploit and obtain unauthorized access to vulnerabilities. Organizations would need to utilize solutions that can consistently track and keep remote workers secured from potential risks to secure the increasing number of endpoints.

The use of an endpoint management system provides companies with multiple advantages, such as securing remote workforce, automating provisioning and compliance, maintaining endpoint environments, and facilitating streamlined troubleshooting of endpoints.

IoT Security

IoT devices across a number of sectors and organizations are expanding, improving productivity and innovation. Essential infrastructures, such as healthcare, maritime, automotive, and shipping, have been changed by industrial IoT. On the other hand, to make our lives smarter and simpler, consumer IoT is used widely in homes.

Among the advantages, however, IoT poses many risks. The risks are often related to the lack of visibility and stable architectures, resulting in higher surface danger. 

Data from sensors are making the IoT a profitable goal. Non-encrypted personal records, hardcoded passwords, firmware, and software upgrades from unverified sources can result in unsecured designs and architectures. Wireless communication protection-related concerns will also rise.

Organizations are starting to exploit Internet of Things (IoT) devices in many sectors, referring to physical objects that have been equipped with sensors, software, or other technologies to share data through an internet link between networks. Although these systems may help companies improve business processes, they are also open to new protection vulnerabilities that need to be carefully tested and protected before they can be taken advantage of by cyber adversaries.

AI-Driven Security Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is maturing exponentially with almost unlimited use as a powerful technology. Our knowledge base and comprehension are progressing at a phenomenal rate by combining human innovation and ingenuity with machine learning scalability. Besides that, with tremendous strength comes responsibility.

Due to its potentially disruptive impact, AI poses questions on several fronts. Such concerns include the relocation of workers, loss of secrecy, possible decision-making prejudices, and loss of control over automated systems and robotics. Responsible AI works on ensuring that technologies are used ethically, transparently, and professionally in a way that is aligned with organizational values, user expectations, and societal norms and laws.

As organizations progress to remote work environments to keep workers safe from COVID-19 public health threats, they would still need to proactively manage the risks involved with these changes to cybersecurity. AI/ML tools with rich protection data sets ensure that companies analyze vulnerability dynamics appropriately, ultimately keeping track of emerging methodologies. Besides, the 2020 IBM Cost of a Data Breach showed that the total cost of a data breach was lowered by $259,354 by AI/ML.

Many would also seek to supplement their third-party programs for penetration testing with automated solutions for real-time feedback that enable a close monitoring process focusing on companies to mature their cybersecurity programs. Driven by AI, in 2021, automation will be a leading trend. Security departments can use automation to increase organizational efficiencies and minimize the burden on security teams by cutting back on the number of administrative activities needed to efficiently track an organization's cybersecurity posture.

Responsible AI can prevent biased data or algorithms from being used, make sure that automated decisions are explainable and justified, and help protect individual privacy and user trust. Responsible AI helps companies to innovate and understand the disruptive value of AI by having consistent rules of engagement.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

The adoption of cloud services, primarily in response to stay-at-home orders, keeps increasing. However, protecting these assets ensures that organizations will need to work on strengthening their systems for cloud security posture management (CSPM).

CSPM instruments enable organizations by vulnerability reviews and automated compliance control to detect and resolve threats. Organizations should use CSPM to consolidate any potential misconfigurations and comply with legislation such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA since the cloud ecosystem has been spreading in multiple regions. This increases the trust and confidence of consumers in the security posture of your company cloud.

There are many benefits of using CSPM tools, including:

• Seeking network access that is misconfigured
• Compliance with common Best Practices standards
• Continuous tracking of the cloud architecture to identify any compliance breaches
• Assessing information risk and detecting highly liberal permissions for accounts
• Capacity to remedy misconfigurations automatically in some situations

Research released in August 2020 showed that in 93 percent of cloud deployments, misconfigured storage services led to more than 2,000 leaks, covering more than 30 billion files since 2018. Organizations looking to grow their digital footprint further will rely on cloud-native technologies that help them identify and fix misconfigurations more efficiently.

Mobile App Compromise

In the times of COVID-19, attacks on mobile devices have escalated, a trend expected to continue. Threats varied from advanced spyware intended to snoop to hackers, leveraging a variety of critical security flaws for Android on encrypted messaging apps. Defenders need to adapt to the lessons of last year and create phone security systems because of these factors. Analysts believe Mobile would lead to the corporate network's continuing "de-parameterization" and cloudification.

"The inversion of the corporate network is the next big thing in security," said Oliver Tavakoli, CTO at Vectra. It used to be where anything very significant was kept on-premise and to enable outbound communications, a limited number of holes were poked into the protective fabric. 2021 is the year when the network's de-parameterization (which has long been expected) must emerge and does so with a vengeance. Businesses who ditch AD (based on legacy architecture) and transfer all their identities to Azure AD are the leading predictor for this (modern cloud-enabled technology).

Cybercriminals have been led by the widespread use of smartphones to concentrate on threats that target mobile applications. This can include but is not limited to SMiShing (like phishing), broken cryptography, network spoofing, weak encryption, etc.

Implementation of 5G Worldwide

When it comes to data transfers, storage, and SAAS, we live in an increasingly cloud-based environment. Both the B2B and B2C markets will soon have the potential to transition into 5G data processing technologies and will be mandated later. According to Medtronic data transmission speeds of up to 10GB/s. 5G is projected to reach nearly 40 percent of the world by 2024. 5G innovation is certainly a shining example of the global availability of progressive technology to users. While technology would make it simpler, it would also open the door for new challenges to arise from cybersecurity.

It would not be an easy transition when it comes to embracing all the opportunities of 5G, both for companies and customers,” said Russ Mohr, Ivanti's 5G security expert. Hackers would be able to infect data packets and perform industrial espionage unnoticed with high-speed data transfers. That is until firms change their attention to keep a close watch on certain attempts at disruptive breaches. When 5G becomes the mainstream method of cloud-based data transfer and networking, much higher standards of protection and monitoring would be needed.

Growing IT Expert Skill Gaps

While AI is becoming a popular cyberspace addition, we are slowly turning to experienced IT professionals for advice on how to secure data. Viruses, ransomware, and malware packages are created by people and groups with malicious intent more frequently.

Who would secure large organizational data against espionage, extortion, and other types of cybersecurity intrusions better than trained professionals? In 2020, B2B companies with huge amounts of data transfers should be hiring a specialist IT expert (or a small team). This is a strategic measure to ensure that the data remains stable and under continuous monitoring by a qualified professional trained to do that.

Support for Remote Operations

IT managers are still reeling from the massive work-from-home change that pushed them to reconsider cybersecurity and placed new frameworks on architectures such as services from cloud and collaborative digital tools such as Skype, Zoom, and Slack. There are no questions. Those trends for 2020 will have a lasting effect.

Many IT security experts complain that remote staff will break policies accidentally or purposefully. 72 percent of respondents were concerned that many remote workers are unaware of best security practices, according to the BlackHat USA attendee survey, which could result in them unintentionally disclose enterprise data and systems to potential threats

More robust end-user professional development finds a mechanism to better start protecting data. Just as a more robust method for data security is secured by continuous monitoring for major operational control weaknesses, proper training provides a better way to close security flaws resulting from the human aspect.' Hands-on activities and instructional instruments that meet users on their safety education journey enable companies to further protect this vector of attack.

Increased Cybersecurity Testing

Strong awareness of the threat environment and how threats are changing, progressing, or rising in number is one of the first steps to developing an effective cybersecurity risk management policy. In recent years, "Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)" initiatives and employee-owned device protection have become more critical. 2020, however, shows that companies with strong security measures are better equipped to protect remote staff for apps, networks, and computers. Looking into 2021, researchers forecast that between 2020 and 2025, the security testing industry is set to rise by 22.3 percent, up to an estimated $16.9 billion.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

Secure access service edge (SASE) includes the convergence of the network security and WAN into a single service model delivered by the cloud. Traditional cybersecurity approaches are no longer adequate for satisfying the evolving requirements of today's networks. Businesses can utilize secure access with a SASE strategy no matter where their users, apps, or devices are located. The need for secure access is clear and more businesses than ever are shifting critical information and resources back and forth between cloud environments.

Extended Detection and Response (EDR)

As per Gartner, EDR is a "SaaS-based, vendor-specific security risk identification and incident management technique that integrates natively multiple security solutions into a unified security operating system that unifies all licensed elements." EDR technologies can become more broadly used in the coming year as a means of proactive detection and response of endpoint threats and comprehensive visibility threat response.

How Certifications will Assist Businesses to Keep Ahead of Cyberattacks in 2021

From both revenue and security aspects, the future lies in the cloud. They need to identify options that will mitigate the most pressing challenges as enterprises build their 2021 cybersecurity budgets. Securing data has been more critical than ever in a rapidly changing digital and physical threat environment. Organizations should look at strategies that minimize current risks while allowing scalability as their digital footprint expands to better mitigate potential risks.

Organizations are armed with tools to constantly track, identify, and manage emerging threats in real-time with agile frameworks such as certification and training and. It will also try to fill the hole in a collaboration that can emerge as the board, CISOs, CIOs, and the rest of the senior management team report. Cybersecurity Boot camp also very helpful to understand these trends efficiently.

Through looking back at 2020, corporate leaders should concentrate on protecting their IT stack to fill holes created by rapid cloud-first or cloud-only strategies. Although we may not realize what it will take tomorrow, we do understand what happened yesterday. Businesses should deal with problems to reduce current risks to better mitigate potential risks while allowing the size to expand as the digital footprint grows. Cloud-native technologies that accommodate consumers and cybercriminals where they reside - in the cloud - are required to try and minimize these risks.

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