CyberSecurity Trends – 2021

#QuarantineDiaries 

Global financial losses from cybercrime in the year 2020 exceeded USD 1 trillion and can increase to USD 10.5 trillion annually by the year 2025.

Scary right?

Cyber threats are turning out to be a serious issue for businesses worldwide to be dealt with. Day-by-day these threats are getting more sophisticated and hugely funded and hackers have the expertise to use advanced technologies to crake the strongest security system with a single weak door.

Continuous revolution in technologies shows various Cybersecurity trending as news of data breach, ransomware, malware, etc.

Let’s have a look few cybersecurity trends for 2021 as I understood from various sources.

1. Clouds, IoT (Internet of Things) in 5G network, and AI (Artificial Intelligence)

These transformational digital technologies helping us to be more interconnected while on the other side have increased vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Worldwide businesses have been moving to the cloud at a fast rate. However, these cloud migrations have chances to trigger new security challenges and threats in 2021. Major cloud security threats include access to cloud storage, data breaches and leaks, data loss, and insecure APIs

IoT with 5G network is the next strong candidate for cybersecurity trend in 2021. With 5G networks expected to roll out in 2020-21 globally, a new era of inter-connectivity will become a reality with the IoT. At the same time, high-speed communication between multiple devices also opens them to vulnerabilities from outside influence, attacks, or an unknown software bug. 5G hardware and software has to be built with a strict sophisticated mechanism

AI is being used in building automated security systems, natural language processing, face detection, and automatic threat detection, which makes it the next cybersecurity trend in 2021. However, it is also being used to develop smart malware and attacks to bypass the latest security protocols in controlling data.

2. Insider Threats

Human error is still a common yet concerning reason for the data breach. Especially during this pandemic where a large number of organizations switching to remote working models there will be a constant risk of being targeted by attackers.

Weak passwords, unauthorized access, unsecured networks at home, etc are the top concerns organizations should work upon to improve the system security of their remote employees.

According to Forrester, insider data breaches are poised to increase by 8% in 2021 and account for 33% of all cybersecurity incidents

3. Ransomware

It is still a number one cyber threat and it’s a serious concern for organizations.

Ransomware attacks are highly focused. As the ransom is demanded in bitcoins, it becomes difficult to track the real hackers. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the hacker will share the decryption key once he gets the ransom. Sometimes and they threaten to publish the victim's data unless a ransom is paid.

4. Automotive Hacking

Self-driving vehicles use a very complex mechanism that requires strong cybersecurity measures. These vehicles become smart using technologies like AI, IoT, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi devices which lead to becoming a top cybersecurity trend in 2021

Automotive related cyber-incidents doubled in 2019 as compared to the previous year (a 605% increase from 2016).

5. Zero Trust Network Architecture

According to Gartner, 80% of new digital business applications will be accessed through ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) by 2020, and 60% of enterprises will move from remote-access VPNs to ZTNA by 2023.

It helps organizations establish a solid network security architecture with dynamic authorization, comprehensive identity, management automation, and risk measurement

The zero-trust architecture model can be defined as a digital identity-based perimeter with four primary capabilities – identity-based schema, continuous trust evaluation, resource secure access, and adaptive access control.

Final words

Apart from the above, other security topics on Social Engineering, Security Service Centers (SOC), Software Patch Management, Work from Home threats, Data Privacy will be trending this year.

So it's strategically important for organizations to skill up and keep pace with these trending threats. These can ruin a company’s market position and can lose customer’s trust

Please do share your thoughts