As we look ahead at what to expect across the cybersecurity landscape in 2022, we’ll continue to see some familiar threats along with the escalation of those threats into something much more significant.
Ransomware should remain at the top of everyone’s list of concerns, because it’s not going away anytime soon. As such, cybersecurity should remain a top priority in terms of your attention, budgeting, and resources.
Here are four key areas that really stand out to me for 2022:
- Ransomware will continue to wreak havoc. Every business and every industry is feeling the impact of ransomware. It’s now more a matter of when your business will be hit—and how hard—rather than if your business will be hit. If you’re not prepared to respond to a cyber incident, you simply haven’t been paying attention to the growing threat.
- We need to worry more about extortionware, which is an escalation of ransomware. The big difference is that, if you don’t pay a ransom when criminals encrypt your data, the criminals will threaten to expose that sensitive data publicly. In turn, that can impact the entire supply chain, including you, your partners, and your vendors. Likewise, if your partners or vendors don’t fulfill their cybersecurity responsibilities, a data breach could affect your business as well.
- Security awareness training must become a regular, ongoing priority. Today, the human factor remains the biggest potential cause of a security breach, whether that’s by making a configuration error or clicking on a phishing email. Employees are often the first line of defense for your business, so make your security awareness training more interesting and relevant to them. The more they’re engaged, the better off your business will be.
- We need IT to establish new cybersecurity best practices. As an industry, we had to make some uncomfortable tradeoffs when the pandemic hit and everyone started working from home. Now that we’ve established the WFH model as a long-term viable option, we need to reassess our best practices for protecting data and keeping our businesses secure. And we can stand to do that much better across the entire industry.
In 2022, make sure you can prevent, detect, and respond to potential threats in real time. And If you need additional help in achieving 24/7/365 coverage, don’t hesitate to find a managed security services provider to supplement your own team.
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