Will your company suffer a data breach in 2022? Probably. But it is safe to assume that you will and then work up your way from that point to building strong defenses.

In 2021, the immense shift to digital and cloud-based technologies put pressure on businesses to meet security demands and protect sensitive data. And more changes are expected for 2022, as organizations continue to move towards hybrid and multi-cloud environments, plus the adoption of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and edge computing.

At the same time, cybercriminals are getting smarter, exploiting gaps in security protocols, making it increasingly difficult for enterprises to stay one step ahead of attacks and enforce active mitigation.

2022 predictions are not unlike the security landscape in 2021. But we can expect a grander scale and more sophistication to cyber attacks. This year, the three most essential threats organizations face are ransomware attacks, cloud threats, and supply chain breaches. The mitigation of these threats basically requires organizations to rethink their approach to security, not necessarily by investing in more tools.

1. Ransomware Attacks 

Over the past few years, ransomware attacks have become more frequent, sophisticated, and ultimately costlier. According to a Microsoft survey of security leaders, ransomware/cyberextortion is the leading security challenge currently.

Hospitals and healthcare organizations have been primarily targeted as the pandemic rages, but companies across the board have felt the impact of ransomware attacks in one way or the other.

Mainly responsible for the latest surge in ransomware breaches are. It’s the latest turn in the evolution of cyberattacks.

As one expert notes, these advanced technologies, previously only available to nation-state hackers, are now readily accessible by local cybercrime networks. Hence, smaller organizations face an increased risk of falling for these sophisticated attacks, for which most have no active mitigation defenses.

Since paying ransoms (even if your insurance is active) is out of the question, the typical approach to defending against ransomware attacks is conducting a comprehensive risk assessment. However, that may not be enough protection going forward this year.

According to CSW’s Ransomware Research Report 2022, there has been a dangerous consistent trend of zero-day vulnerabilities being exploited. There is even a burgeoning trade market for zero-day vulnerabilities among cybercrime gangs.

To prevent zero-day ransomware breaches, organizations must adopt a more agile approach to patching their systems. AI can detect early warnings of an attack before it occurs, but companies must first implement agile vulnerability scanning and penetration testing processes.

2. Supply Chain Attacks

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains globally have become more fragile in securing operations. Promptly, malicious actors have taken advantage of this vulnerability to exploit supply chain weak points, exacerbating the crisis. Notably, cyber threats have increased 81% since the pandemic erupted.

As the COVID battle enters its third year, there is no clear end in sight despite the progress made so far. Therefore, security leaders should anticipate more supply chain threats in 2022; after all, cyber attackers thrive where there are gaps in security monitoring.

Supply chains are especially vulnerable because such centralized platforms present a low barrier of entry to malicious actors. And even though today’s supply chains are distributed, the security architecture is concentrated at the top, thereby leaving the endpoints dangerously exposed.

More so, because supply chains bring together multiple clients, partners, and third parties, the fallout of an attack can be disastrous. For instance, Kaseya’s supply chain business model significantly worsened its attack in mid-2021 which affected 1000 other organizations.

Most companies facing supply chain risks adopt a zero-trust approach for risk mitigation. Assuming that all network activities are dangerous by default forces the workers to think differently about security so that every action falls under scrutiny.

However, security teams must also prioritize threats based on riskiness and assign the appropriate level of defense to each threat.

3. Cloud Security

Going by expert predictions, cloud adoption is set to receive a massive boost in 2022. Gartner forecasts that public cloud spending will increase by 21.7% this year.

Such expectations should make security leaders and business executives think deeply about their mitigation strategy and overall security architecture and whether it can stand the test of time. After all, every technological advancement presents a new exploit opportunity to nefarious actors.

Because cloud adoption is a critical digital transformation requirement, many companies migrate their systems in haste, leading to rising incidences of cloud misconfiguration.

According to a 2021 report on cloud security, 36% of companies suffered cloud breaches due to misconfiguration. A 2022 report from Palo Alto Networks corroborated that organizations struggled with comprehensive security and compliance, having expanded their cloud use by over 25% during the pandemic.

In addition, Gartner had predicted that through 2025, enterprise customers would be responsible for 99% of cloud security failures due to not enforcing appropriate ownership and responsibility policies.

This may stem from a poor understanding of shared responsibility models; basically, many customers cannot determine where the providers’ security responsibility ends. That’s why there can be a cloud provider outage, and while one company’s services went down, the other’s remained active, as was the case of Reddit and Netflix in relation to AWS.

Besides regular practices such as implementing an identity and management solution and securing endpoints, organizations must review their cloud security policies for clarity and close any responsibility gaps in monitoring and protection.

Conclusion

While many factors contribute to this ever-growing threat landscape, one of the most significant is the evolution of multi-vector threats.

Today’s attackers are using multiple threat vectors in combination with one another — everything from malware to social engineering to phishing — to try to get around existing controls. This creates a situation where organizations need to invest in multiple technologies for different types of threats and attacks, which is inefficient and complex.

Collecting all these tools under unified supervision helps prevent gaps in monitoring. For instance, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) have emerged as useful cloud migration tools for enforcing policies and visibility.

In the same way, companies must review their cybersecurity approaches to embrace agile and zero-trust thinking, proactively mitigating against threats.