Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Power Play: 4 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2023 about Electrical Grids, the Internet, Third Parties and Ransomware
By Art Sturdevant, VP of technical
operations at Censys
If
there is a common thread for our 2023 predictions, it's that too many companies
are still investing in security solutions that are better suited for systems of
the past: An anti-virus and firewall package isn't enough. Binging on lots of
tools doesn't adequately address the core issues either - it just leads to alert fatigue, false
positives, wasted resources and staff turnover.
Instead of "piling on" with products, it's essential to get the basics
right: maintain an accurate inventory of systems, control user authentication,
patch systems quickly, identify which outside parties have access to your data
and understand what applications and activities you "own" on the internet.
With this in mind, here are four predictions for cybersecurity in 2023:
The energy sector will emerge as
a prime target for attacks.
Many organizations within this sector heavily utilize supervisory control and
data acquisition (SCADA) and industrial control systems (ICS) and remain
textbook examples of what can go wrong without strong security controls and
often outdated equipment.
There's also a growing tendency here to enable remote access on devices
that were never meant to be connected to the Internet, which increases
vulnerability exposure for data and devices. Anyone who reads the headlines has
seen that global tensions have triggered the targeting of water filtration
plants, electrical grids, nuclear plants, etc. To avoid contributing to the
next cyber attack "breaking news" situation, industry leaders need to overhaul
their security strategies and resources to incorporate measures summarized here.
Security teams will focus more
on the internet. They won't
suddenly ignore servers and other embedded systems. But they will monitor
internet applications and system activity closely as adversaries keep pushing
at the fringes of the attack surface. As organizations continue to shift toward
zero trust networks (ZTNs), they'll consider external inventories as a primary
point of focus so teams can sufficiently protect these critical ingress points.
As part of this, the adoption of external attack surface management
(EASM) solutions will start to soar to the point in which they emerge as a
foundational pillar of a security program. It's important to avoid confusing
your basic vulnerability management platform with EASM, which enables teams to
identify and mitigate risks associated with internet-facing assets and systems.
We're hopeful that we'll see EASM vendors distinguish themselves in the year
ahead by demonstrating how they can push the perceived boundaries of what can
be detected without an agent.
Organizations will deeply
scrutinize their third-party/software as a service (SaaS) providers. They'll have no other choice. As regulations
and fines pile up, security leaders and their teams will perform greater due
diligence on cloud vendors and third parties to verify that they are committed
to defense investments and strategies which measure up to their standards and
are compliant.
Ransomware criminals will target
the bigger fish. They go
where the money goes, right? So why take over grandmom's hard drive or some
mom-and-pop business when they can take down a huge hospital or utility network
for a hefty payoff? The most recent Verizon Business 2022 Data Breach
Investigations Report
reveals that ransomware incidents have grown 13 percent within the last year -
more than the last five years combined. We expect this trend to only increase
in 2023.
For many organizations, the prospect of disruptive and costly cyber
threats makes for a potentially foreboding 2023. But your organization can rise
above that by implementing essential policies and practices: Constantly educate
employees about the latest phishing trends and tactics. Identify and protect
what you have on the internet. Boost investments into application defense
tools. Even simple steps like container scanning, static analysis and
dependency tracking will sharpen your game in a big way, helping prevent
attacks for a successful - and safe - year ahead.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Sturdevant’s career spans more than 20 years and includes time as an entrepreneur, a Sr. Security Engineer at Duo Security, and most recently as VP of Technical Operations at Censys.