Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Cybersecurity Predictions: API attacks, SSE and Deep Fakes
By Members of the Netskope Team
Cybersecurity has been a crucial focal point over the last year, impacting every sector from government to private industry. Trends facilitated by the pandemic like the “Great Resignation” and the rise of remote employees will continue to have ripple effects throughout the cybersecurity landscape next year. Here are our 2022 predictions on how this could unfold:
APIs will continue to grow in 2022 as a point of focus for attackers
Across industries, the abuse of APIs, and their misconfigurations, continues to grow as a risk. Back in 2019, Gartner even predicted that by 2022 abuses of API will become the most-frequent attack vector, and as we actually look ahead at 2022 on the horizon, API abuses show no signs of slowing down as an attack surface.
– David Fairman, CSO APAC, Netskope
Office reopenings will cause some growing pains as well security concerns
In the new year, office re-openings and job resignations will drive a surge in malware attacks and both intentional as well as accidental data leaks due to employees changing jobs or mixing up personal vs business app instances. Similarly, the return to the office will drive an explosion in SD-WAN deployments as more customers move off legacy WANs, decommission their costly MPLS circuits, and steer more traffic direct-to-cloud.
– Jeff Brainard, Product Marketing Director, Netskope
New and unpatched VPN and endpoint vulnerabilities will increasingly be exploited
Patching or upgrading the firmware of your endpoint and VPN appliances can be a tedious process, requiring thorough testing before rolling out patches as well as carefully scheduled maintenance windows. Unfortunately, attackers are well aware of the resulting vulnerabilities and exposures. According to CISA’s list of vulnerabilities most frequently exploited by attackers in 2020 and 2021, many are related to remote access, with some even dating back as far as 2018. Make 2022 the year you get your VPN and endpoint vulnerabilities under control, potentially by accelerating to cloud-delivered Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
– Tsailing Merrem, Director of Product Marketing, Netskope
Technology-specific security vendors are going to redefine/rebrand themselves as SSE vendors
SASE is a framework-a suggestion for how cloud security should be designed as security and networking converge in the cloud era. Security Service Edge (SSE) represents the security services needed for SASE, and is an actual set of products and services companies can buy today. SSE will prompt significant consolidation of companies and their tools to offer single platform security. If the way SASE hype has already played out in the two years since the debut of the term is any indication, SSE will also place the burden of selection on customers, who will need clear advice to figure out fact from fiction.
– Shamla Naidoo, CISO, Head of Cloud Strategy, Netskope
A proliferation of deep fakes, voice cloning and misinformation
Deep Fake and misinformation will thrive on social media causing distrust in society driving further political and societal divide as well being used for financial gain. Voice cloning, a derivative of deepfake, will exponentially increase as fraudsters use this to create social engineering attacks and bypass voice-based biometrics authentication systems. Digital ID verification systems will also be at risk of being fooled which will then lead to potential mistrust in eKYC and Digital ID verification systems.
– David Fairman, CSO APAC, Netskope
Bad actors have no intention of slowing down and next year will be crucial for companies to be prepared to defend their cloud environments. Regardless of what happens in 2022, the cybersecurity landscape is guaranteed to evolve in unprecedented ways.
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