Cyber Breaches will hugely impact businesses in 2021

The Year 2020 brought a historic pandemic and bad actors leveraged COVID-19-themed threats to test our security operations and our unprecedented shift to a remote work life. As we have already entered into 2021, these concerns are still at the forefront, but we are also looking ahead to other cyber threats likely to confront us in the months and years ahead. The ever-increasing use of connected devices, apps and web services in our homes will also make us more susceptible to digital home break-ins. This threat is compounded by many individuals continuing to work from home, meaning this threat not only impacts the consumers and their families, but enterprises as well.

Attacks on cloud platforms and users will evolve into a highly polarized state where they are either mechanized and widespread or sophisticated and precisely handcrafted. Mobile users will need to beware of phishing or smishing messages aimed at exploiting and defrauding them through mobile payment services. Secondly, use of QR codes has notably accelerated during the pandemic, raising the specter of a new generation of social engineering techniques that seek to exploit consumers and gain access to their personal data. With this we can expect most sophisticated threat actors will increasingly use social networks to target high value individuals working in sensitive industry sectors and roles.

The pace at which businesses are changing and evolving, equipping a company to excel in a changing business landscape doesn't confine to just technological advancements. A successful company needs to adapt to change more rapidly in sync with the right infrastructure and workforce readiness to take on new challenges and embrace new ways of working. The New Year offers hope and opportunities for consumers and enterprises, but also more cybersecurity challenges.

What makes cyber attacks so dangerous that it uses trusted software to bypass cyber defenses, infiltrate victim organizations with the backdoor and allow the attacker to take any number of secondary steps. This could involve stealing data, destroying data, holding critical systems for ransom, orchestrating system malfunctions that result in kinetic damage, or simply implanting additional malicious content throughout the organization to stay in control even after the initial threat appears to have passed.

Hacking the Home to Hack the Office, with the increasingly dense overlay of numerous connected devices, apps and web services used in our professional and private lives will grow the connected home’s attack surface to the point that it raises significant new risks for individuals and their employers. In 2021 we will witness how Weaponized AI attacks on cloud platforms and cloud users will weaponize AI and evolve into a highly polarized state where they are either “mechanized and widespread” or “sophisticated and precisely handcrafted”.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief editor, VARINDIA