Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Great Resignation, Ransomware, Privacy, and more
The cybersecurity industry saw many challenges during 2021, including a rise in ransomware, personalized attack methods, and the talent shortage. Barracuda CEO Hatem Naguib and CTO Fleming Shi share their predictions for the year ahead.
Hatem Naguib, CEO of Barracuda
COVID-19 will continue to accelerate digital transformation for small and medium-sized enterprises in 2022. Security shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be part of every digital transformation decision.
The COVID-19 pandemic will continue to have as much impact on businesses and the ways they use technology in 2022, as it did in 2021. The nature of the crisis has evolved, but it hasn’t ended. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies moved rapidly to react to the pandemic as people had to quickly shift operations to the cloud, adjust to remote work, and reimagine the way they handled digital interactions with their customers. Many of these initiatives were long-standing projects that moved to being deployed at hyperdrive speed to meet the challenges presented by the pandemic. In 2022, we will find businesses needing to continue to respond quickly to dynamic local and global conditions. Agility and flexibility have never been more of a competitive differentiator than they are now.
In 2022, companies will continue to leverage more and more technology to address these challenges. From a technology perspective, that means there will be more cloud adoption and more small and medium-sized enterprises using SaaS solutions, which in turn increases their potential attack surface. After two years of COVID-19 and accelerated attacks, security and compliance must be at the front and center of every technology decision. This will lead to more SMEs turning to their MSPs and vendors for SASE solutions and Zero Trust Access to help them secure their people, networks, applications, and data in the cloud, no matter where their people are located or what devices they’re using.
The “Great Resignation” will turn security challenges into a security crisis and create new opportunities.
Small and mid-sized companies were already short-staffed and having trouble hiring the staff they need to protect themselves from security risks. The “Great Resignation” will make those challenges even more acute, especially in the tech and healthcare sectors. This will make a tough situation worse.
As a result, in 2022 businesses will rely more on their vendors to provide not only automated tools, but also services, like XDR and MDR. Managed services providers will become a critical resource as well. Gartner predicted 40% of mid-sized companies will leverage MDR by 2024. From a midmarket perspective, companies will need a service provider to help them successfully leverage SOC / NOC / XDR capabilities and stay secure. Increasingly, only large enterprise organizations will be able to manage their security needs internally.
One interesting opportunity that comes from the great game of musical chairs is as people shift where their resources are and where they’re coming from, it creates momentum for companies to really think about the importance of diversity in the employee base as they hire people and bring them on board. I don’t mean diversity just in the traditional sense, such as gender or race, but also a diversity of background and skills.
In 2022, you’ll see more security positions filled by people who come from unexpected backgrounds or with a different set of skills. Due to the nature of the threats and the complexity of the environments, companies can’t go back to just hiring who they’ve hired before. Addressing security challenges constantly requires fresh thinking in the face of ever-changing attacks and overwhelming alerts. This is a great opportunity to bring in different perspectives, and in the cybersecurity or IT space that will play a prominent role in how companies secure themselves.
Privacy requirements will drive security decisions.
In 2022, privacy will dominate the security conversation because data is no longer something that can be leveraged with no accountability. Almost 75% of countries have some type of privacy regulation now, so all business will need to protect and enrich any data they collect from customers in a way that respects the privacy requirements customers have come to expect as default.
These conversations about privacy policy also come up in the context of digital transformation. Companies are adopting a lot of SaaS technologies, downloading apps and software, but as a business you have to be aware of the privacy implications of all of the technologies you’re using. In 2022, companies will be making decisions about which products they use based on whether or not the data compliance is sufficient for their customers.
Having the tools in place to ensure compliance will become more important as well, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. Are your employees storing the right data in the right place? Are your suppliers protecting your data and your customers’ data? As you’re leveraging SaaS solutions like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, you need understand what your teams are doing and make sure you’ve got tools to not only secure your data but to make sure you’re compliant. In addition, the past year of prominent supply-chain attacks have required businesses to ensure their supply chain of vendors are meeting security and privacy compliance requirements. We have all learned the painful way that we are only as strong as our weakest links.
In 2022 governments will get serious about working together for a more coordinated, effective response to cybercrime.
Ransomware criminal gangs are the modern day pirates of the high seas. We’re now dealing with global criminal operations that are driving ransomware and similar types of attacks, and it’s important for people to recognize the scale. Recent Barracuda research found that 70% of businesses have been hit by a ransomware attack, and that’s a staggering number.
The sophistication of the tools that cybercriminals are using has drastically changed the nature and effectiveness of these attacks. Back in 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers stole tools from the NSA and then started leaking these tools on the internet. That was a game changer. Tools that were previously used by nation states are now in the hands of cybercriminals who are leveraging these same tools to attack corporations and individuals.
Looking ahead, we can expect that attackers will use AI and machine learning to evade defenses. As certain technologies, such as block chain and quantum computing, become more mainstream, they will give attackers unprecedented levels of anonymity and scale to drive these attacks even further. As a result, we’ll see more need for automation in how we protect against those attacks.
Now we’re starting to see governments step up and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into what are arguably military-level exercises to stop these criminal gangs. In 2022, we’re also going to see more cooperation between companies and governments to shore up defenses against attacks by these cybercriminal gangs. Having engagement between the private and public sectors increase and having vendors engage more deeply together to share information will be an important part of defending against these attacks. In the end, we have to remember we’re all in the security business. Ultimately, our job is to protect society at large from cyberattacks.
Fleming Shi, CTO of Barracuda
Ransomware Will Remain a Threat, But Evolve
Ransomware will still be a problem in 2022, but we are starting to see governments taking it very seriously and collaborating at the nation-state level. The actions from these collaborations are slowing down the ransomware attackers’ ability to transfer their assets, which will impact the volume of attacks in the coming year. If attackers deploy a ransomware attack and they’re not able to collect – even if there is the willingness to pay or negotiate – it gets to a point where there is enough fear and uncertainty to make them less likely to attack. In 2022, we need to continue to work together as a global alliance to make sure we slow down the movement of these assets. If we can effectively slow down the wealth movement, it will make a difference.
However, we’re in the post-breach era where attackers are ahead of their targets, since they have their hands on stolen data, including credentials. These attacks range from extortion on valuable data to penetrating the software supply chain. It has gone beyond disrupting business operations and goes as far as revealing information to discredit a corporation and destroy the trust chain.
I also predict there will be a renewed focus on governments prioritizing cybersecurity initiatives, building alliances with vendors, and sharing data with other countries. This level of collaboration will help improve security for everyone.
Protecting Critical Infrastructures Will be a Main Priority
Critical infrastructure will continue to face significant security challenges in 2022. This critical infrastructure includes everything from energy and financial services to education and healthcare. For example, there have been numerous stories about how ransomware attacks that hit hospitals affect patient treatment and even lead to deaths. Attacks on critical infrastructure have the most direct impact on people’s lives, so security will be a challenge as cybercriminals continue to focus on these vulnerable areas.
IT Security Executives Will Need to Update Their Skills
IT security executives will need to develop the ability to understand forensics and incident response. Many IT security organizations – whether they’re large companies or small companies working with a managed service provider – are still struggling with too many tools and not getting the signals to work together.
Detection and response will be the keywords to help IT security executives achieve what they need to in 2022 and beyond. Improving in this area will require an Open XDR platform or managed XDR solution through a service provider. Those tools will enable IT security executives to respond more efficiently than they are now. Right now, most companies have more tools and more information than they know what to do with. For example, we have seen enterprises investing in tools to protect multiple attack surfaces. It will be essential to capture the signals from each tool and correlate the data for actionable insights. From prevention, detection to response, it will require forensics and security analytics skills to defend against today’s cyberattacks. And with the shortage of cybersecurity skills, utilizing a managed SoC (Security Operations Center) with XDR capabilities could be the answer for small, medium enterprises.
Consolidation and XDR Will Expand
Consolidation on data-driven platforms is one change you will see in 2022 as the market moves to more of a service-driven kind of tooling, including XDR and managed detection and response. Detection and response will get more complex, and it’s a skillset many organizations are missing that will need to be addressed. Many companies, especially SMBs or small-to-medium-sized enterprises, will need some type of managed service to help them in this area. I think they must get the assistance they need to respond efficiently and effectively to survive these cyber-attacks without investing so much in building a team in-house. So, a lot of that market is going to shift toward managed security service providers. At an enterprise level, it will mean getting to know what tools you’re using, which signals you’re getting from those tools and consolidating those signals to make detection and response easier for your team.
While XDR stands for extended detection and response, it really means extending to all the telemetry information you can get with other tools. As mentioned earlier, Detection and Response in the XDR context are enormous gaps for many organizations. They will need help with detection and response, which will drive increased demand for this emerging technology.
New Roles Will Continue to Emerge
Cybersecurity champion is a new role that we will start to see emerging in the next few years, especially at organizations where they are developing software. You are going to see security champions who will focus on what we call shifting left because now it is about the developers, software development, and the software supply chain, which includes Open-Source libraries and other third-party libraries. On the very left of the entire software development lifecycle, getting that level of security attention at the developer level is where those roles will start to add value. There are software tools that allow you to scan for dependencies and understand your Open-Source risks. Those tools will generate the type of initiatives that these roles can drive within the developer community.
The other role I see emerging in the next few years is a security analyst. To effectively detect and respond to threats, which means forensics and incident response, you’re going to need security analysts who understand the correlation of these different signals and can execute on responding to these threats.
Proactivity in Protection is Key
Security reporting structures will depend on the organization’s maturity and the leadership they have in place, such as if there is a CISO involved. Many IT teams won’t naturally be reporting to a CISO because their approach to security is event-driven. But where you can be predictive and preventative and have the right tools and resources, you can have plans and programs to prevent incidents. Instead of having an event-driven approach to security, organizations will need to shift to proactively putting the measures and stopping those attacks from ever happening or stopping it earlier in the attack chain, so there’s less damage. If you don’t have a security practice at the very top, it will be challenging to make this kind of change.
In 2022, cybersecurity will evolve to meet the growing threats and public concerns over protection, while navigating an industry-wide talent shortage.
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