In my blog, which I started with Turkish content in 2018, I decided to continue my blog posts with English content in order to increase my international awareness. You can access my old Turkish blog posts from the Turkish section of my site. I thank all of my followers for their support, who did not leave me alone in this process. I want to start my journey in line with my new goals by addressing the topic of 2021 cyber security expectations in my first English article. I wish you a pleasant reading.
Özden ERÇİN
Corporations throughout all industries commonly release future reviews about what’s to return inside the subsequent one year, but nobody in 2019 anticipated the global pandemic or the global reaction to it. In one manner or any other, our all active live have been upended. Corporations has been forced to make choices that essentially, and perhaps permanently, modified the manner they do way of doing business. Although 2020 is full of significant uncertainties, the focus is still in the area of cyber security. Hackers continue to carry out new attacks every day, regardless of the difficult situations they face in line with their goals. Hackers continue to be motivated by espionage and monetary gain, their tactics and techniques continue to improve all the time. This suggests that hacktivist groups will continue to breach data, increase the impact of business disruptions, data loss, reputational losses, and nearly continuous financial losses.
Inside the near time period, the coronavirus will in all likelihood retain to have a massive effect on enterprise cyber security operations, with a focus on helping far flung work, digital occasions. The pandemic pressured almost every enterprise to come to be higher at working underneath drastically changed operating situations and within the wake of a converting environment. These pandemic pressured situations will most possibly persist during 2021.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, it reminded us once again the importance of face-to-face communication with our customers and colleagues. Communicating with audio and video undoubtedly has a more positive effect than an email correspondence. Increasing video conferences, at the same time, It also emphasized that webcam security is an issue that needs attention from a security point of view. When looking at different priorities for covid-19 process, I assume that perimeter protection and privacy issues importance will increase due to remote work.
Schools and universities have pivoted to large-scale use of e-learning platforms. Attacks can still disrupt effect remote learning activities over the approaching year. Thus, Remote education systems that became widespread with Covid-19 will continue to be the target of hackers.
Techniques for fake video or audio are now advanced enough to be weaponized and used to create targeted content to manipulate everything. Fake audio could be used for voice phishing attacks so that it could be used to bypass voice authentication. I think that deep fake technology will become more mature and emerge in the next year.
The use of ransomware accelerated and have become additional dangerous than we’ve ever seen in 2020. I tend to expect ransomware to continue its rapid climb in 2021, with ransomware varieties increasing alongside frequency of attacks. One distressing trend is that attackers aren’t solely creating ransomware-as-a-service, which has providing malware and therefore the skills to deploy it on a one-time or current basis.
In 2021, attackers will increasingly target the most important assets owned by organizations. While many organizations pay the ransom and can access their data again, they often forget that the attackers still have their data. In 2021, organizations must be prepared for a ransomware attack. This means ensuring network segmentation, a realistic plan and conducting exercises with senior management and other key personnel so that everyone is ready for the best possible action. Organizations must have an incident response plan. They should also create secure backups that teams can return to if needed.
Many corporations delayed multi-factor authentication to legacy systems as they were fast their migration to cloud platforms in recent years. The urgency of business necessities usually drives organizations to maneuver technology adoption efforts forward quicker while not having the correct security controls in place. Organizations ought to secure the strategies of access to data, which means focusing on identity and access management and revisiting who qualifies for privileged access.
The connected, high-speed world promised by 5G also gives criminals and hackers opportunities to launch attacks and cause disruption by targeting that connectivity. E-health devices will collect data about users’ wellbeing, connected car services will monitor users’ movements, and smart city applications will collect information about how users live their lives. This massive volume of data from always-on, 5G devices will need to be protected against breaches, theft and tampering to ensure privacy and security against attacks, especially as a lot of this data will bypass corporate networks and their security controls. 5G technologies will bring important cyber security risks along with the opportunities it brings. I foresee that cyber security violations may occur in this area in the next year.
As 5G networks roll out, the numbers of connected IoT devices can massively expand – drastically increasing networks’ vulnerability to giant scale, multi-vector cyber-attacks. IoT devices and their connections to networks and clouds are still a weak link in security: it’s laborious to urge complete visibility of devices, and that they have advanced security requirements. Need to be a lot of holistic approach to IoT security, with a mix of ancient and new controls to safeguard these ever-growing networks across.
Corporations had a lot to overcome in 2020, and the rapidly changing security environment was just one of the challenges. We know that the likelihood that these challenges will continue in 2021 is high and that they will only come from cyber threats. The cyber security problem seems to never end, as the global pandemic brings with it more than working remotely. Cybersecurity will continue to be an important topic in the energy sector in 2021 as systems, products and industrial environments become more complex, connected to the internet and interconnected. In 2021, the cybersecurity landscape will continue to evolve and new threats will emerge at least every day. Cybersecurity will be essential not only for gaining customer trust, but also for maintaining critical infrastructure, people and assets. Hoping that 2021 will be calmer than 2020, I have tried to share my predictions about cyber security for 2021.
