2021 was one of the worst years as far as cybersecurity is concerned. We saw record numbers of data breaches, cybersecurity attacks, and attacks on critical infrastructure. 2022 will not be much different. Cybercriminals will continue to exploit vulnerabilities and fulfill their malicious designs.
As a cybersecurity professional or a business owner, your job is to protect your digital assets from these hackers. How would you do that in such a situation? The best way to combat it is by increasing cybersecurity awareness in your employees. Every new thing brings new threats so your cybersecurity awareness programs should adopt them.
In this article, Anti-Dos will highlight seven risks you should focus on to improve your cybersecurity awareness in 2022.
7 Cybersecurity Risks To Be Aware of In 2022
Here are seven cybersecurity risks you can not afford to ignore in 2022.
Deep Fake Crimes
We have already seen many cases of voice-based fraud where the cybercriminals mimic the voice of a top company executive by using artificial intelligence and asking the person on the other side of the phone to transfer the payment. Companies have already lost millions of dollars due to voice-based fraud and we will see that number grow even more in 2022.
Attackers will use newer methods and channels to launch deep fake attacks in 2022. We could see cybercriminals graduate from fake audio to deep fake videos to trick targets into taking their desired action. As the popularity of video conferencing tools grows and their adoption skyrockets due to remote work, attackers will target these tools for such purposes as well. Businesses need to equip their employees with awareness about deep fake crimes so they can easily identify these attacks and don’t fall victim to them.
State Sponsored Attacks
The days when war was fought with missiles and guns are coming to an end. Today, wars are fought on the digital frontier. State-sponsored attacks will continue to grow in 2022. Countries will use armies of hackers backed by state funding to launch cybersecurity attacks on adversaries. To ensure your business does not end up on the receiving end of it, it is important to educate your team on how to protect themselves from state-sponsored attacks.
Since these hackers have state funding to back them up, they can be more deadly as compared to traditional cybercriminals who don’t have that many resources at their disposal. As a result, the magnitude and volume of attacks launched by these state-sponsored cybercriminals could be much higher than traditional cybercriminals. We could also see the huge influx of distributed denial of service attacks in 2022.
Supply Chain Attacks
Another cybersecurity trend that took off in 2021 is supply chain attacks. Businesses that rely heavily on or even partially on suppliers should take note of this uptick in supply chain attacks. No matter how good your security systems might be, you can still become a target of an enterprise cyber security attack or data breach due to a vulnerability found in your supplier. Attackers take this alternative route especially when they see that it is hard to target and compromise your critical data directly. Always do your due diligence when finding a supplier for your brand as you don’t want to get penalized for someone else’s mistake.
Here are some of the things you can do to protect your business from supply chain attacks.
- Keep everything up to date
- Install security patches as soon as they are made available
- Make security an integral part of your software development lifecycle
- Have a incident response plan
IoT Security
With billions of IoT devices already in cyberspace and billions of new ones joining every year, the enterprise attack surface has tremendously increased. This gives cyber attackers billions of targets to hit. Since these devices are not fully secured and usually in isolation, organizations can easily lose track of them, which makes it more convenient for hackers to compromise these devices. Once they succeed, they use it to move laterally through your network. So, what can you do about it?
First of all, you should always buy IoT devices from manufacturers that prioritize security. Next, enable device discovery features so you can track your IoT devices. You can even create a separate network for IoT devices through network segmentation. Regularly update the firmware of IoT devices and install patches as soon as possible.
Social Engineering Attacks
One of the most common weapons cybercriminals use against businesses is social engineering attacks so you must educate your employees about it. The more aware your employees are about social engineering attacks, the less likely they are to fall prey to these attacks and the harder it will be for attackers to trick them. Prevent your employees from sharing their sensitive data such as login ID and password or financial information with anyone. Avoid downloading any attachments sent to you via email. Never click on a link that is sent to you from a suspicious email address especially if you don’t know the source it takes you to.
Customer Data
Cyber Attackers will use unique techniques to steal customer data. Whether it is through drones in the sky or exfiltration of in-flight data or customer data of any type, cybercriminals will actively target customer data in 2022. Some attackers might use spoofing techniques while others target insecure networks and devices. Remote access-based attacks will also increase and you should either restrict remote access or secure it properly otherwise, your customer data might be at risk.
Crypto Security
Nonfungible tokens, cryptocurrencies, crypto exchanges, crypto wallets will all become a target of cyberattacks. Attackers will try to break into your crypto wallet and steal your digital asset. We have already seen examples where attackers have managed to steal digital currency worth millions of dollars from users’ crypto wallets. The best way to save your cryptocurrencies from getting stolen is to take them off the exchange or wallet and store it in a cold wallet.
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