2020 witnessed many trends in the area of Cybersecurity and quite a lot of changes were witnessed on a global scale as organizations are gradually adopting the new normal which came as a result of the pandemic.
The socio-economic ills that followed the Pandemic coupled with the forced holidays sparked cyber threats and there came a need to combat the abnormalities.
It is projected that 2021 and beyond will experience a significant shift with the rise of new intelligent edges, which goes beyond just end-users and devices remotely connected to the network. Cybersecurity will also be subjected to attacks.
The intelligent edge is a target
Over some years, the traditional network perimeter has evolved into multiple edge environments, WAN, multi-cloud, data center, remote worker, IoT, and more, each with its unique risks.
One of the advantages of cybersecurity in all of this is that while all of these edges are interconnected many organizations have sacrificed centralized visibility and unified control in favor of performance and digital transformation.
While end-users and their home resources are already targeting for cybercriminals, sophisticated attackers will use these as a springboard into other things going forward.
Trojans evolve to target the edge
Corporate network attacks launched from a remote worker’s home network, especially when usage trends are clearly understood, can be carefully coordinated so they do not raise suspicions.
Eventually, advanced malware could also discover even more valuable data and trends using new EATs (Edge Access Trojans) and perform more invasive activities such as intercept requests off the local network to compromise additional systems or inject additional attack commands.
5G may enable advanced swarm-attacks
Compromising cybersecurity and leveraging new 5G-enabled devices will open up opportunities for more advanced threats.
These attacks leverage hijacked devices divided into subgroups, each with specialized skills.
They target networks or devices as an integrated system and share intelligence in real-time to refine their attack as it is happening.
Swarm technologies for cybersecurity require large amounts of processing power to enable individual swarmbots and to efficiently share information in a bot swarm.
This enables them to rapidly discover, share, and correlate vulnerabilities, and then shift their attack methods to better exploit what they discover.
Smart devices or other home-based systems that interact with users, will no longer simply be targets for attacks, but will also be conduits for deeper attacks.
Leveraging important contextual information about users including daily routines, habits, or financial information could make social engineering-based attacks more successful.
Smarter cybersecurity attacks could lead to much more than turning off security systems, disabling cameras, or hijacking smart appliances, it could enable the ransoming and extortion of additional data or stealth credential attacks.
As ransomware continues to evolve with IT systems increasingly converging with operational technology (OT) systems, particularly in critical infrastructure, there will be even more data, devices, and unfortunately, lives at risk.
Extortion, defamation, and defacement are all tools of the ransomware trade already.
Going forward, human lives will be at risk when field devices and sensors at the OT edge, which include critical infrastructure increasingly becoming targets for cybercriminals in the field.
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