GLOBAL organisations will emerge more alert and better prepared in 2022, thanks to a comprehensive, proactive, cloud-first approach to mitigating cyber risk.
Trend Micro Inc, a global cybersecurity leader, further predicted that threat actors in 2022 will focus ransomware attacks on cloud and data centre workloads as well as exposed services to take advantage of the large number of employees continuing to work from home.
Vulnerabilities will be weaponised in record time and chained with privilege escalation bugs to drive successful campaigns.
“It’s been a tough couple of years for cybersecurity teams in Malaysia, disrupted by work-from-home mandates due to the movement control order (MCO) and challenged as corporate attack surfaces have exploded in size,” commented Trend Micro’s managing director (Malaysia and nascent countries) Goh Chee Hoh.
“However, as hybrid work emerges and more certainty returns day-to-day, security leaders will be able to plot a robust strategy to plug gaps and make the bad guys work much harder.”
In a related development, Trend Micro said it has blocked 40.9 billion e-mail threats, malicious files and malicious URLs for customers in 1H 2021 alone – a 47% year-on-year (yoy) increase.
In Malaysia, Trend Micro detected and blocked 232.7 million attacks where over half consisted of e-mail threats, registering a 24% yoy increase in the corresponding period.
Although IoT systems, global supply chains, cloud environments, and DevOps functions will be in the crosshairs, Trend Micro expects many organisations to be ready for the challenge as they build out and implement a strategy to proactively mitigate such emerging risks through:
- Stringent server hardening and application control policies to tackle ransomware
- Risk-based patching and a high-alert focus on spotting security gaps
- Enhanced baseline protection among cloud-centric small medium businesses (SMBs)
- Network monitoring for greater visibility into IoT environments
- Zero Trust principles to secure international supply chains
- Cloud security focused on DevOps risk and industry best practices
- Extended detection and response (XDR) to identify attacks across entire networks. – Dec 10, 2021
