BeyondTrust. Essential Cybersecurity Survival Strategies for 2022 & Beyond

In cyberspace, there exists no safe harbor. Every organization with a digital presence is exposed like an island amidst an angry, implacable ocean that seems to send wave after wave of cyberattack.

The year 2021 arguably stands out as the most brutal and shocking in terms of cyberattacks. We have clearly entered an era of “assume breach” and “zero trust”. We need to not only rethink security, but recalibrate it based on the changes to technology happening around us.

Defenders at Disadvantage

While the ‘quantum leap’ in digital transformation galvanized by the pandemic has helped organizations innovate, unlock efficiencies, and enable more remote work, it’s also tipped the scales of the perpetual cyber arms race decidedly in favor of criminals. The Wall Street Journal called the hybrid workplace a “Cybersecurity Nightmare,” and characterized it as “a hacker’s dream—a constantly changing mix of office and remote workers, devices that move in and out of the company networks, and security staffs stretched thin.”

One sign of how unpalatable the odds have become is that some cyber insurance providers have thrown up their hands and exited the market altogether, while most others have hiked premiums and implemented more stringent qualifications.

An increasingly connected world ushers in higher efficiencies, improved collaboration, and new solutions, but the tradeoff can be increased interdependency and fragility. Phishing, fileless attacks, and ransomware are three soaring threat trends capitalizing on this new environment.

Digital transformation and remote working together have vastly expanded the attack surface, presenting threat actors with an environment ripe with vulnerabilities and planes of unmanaged privileged access to exploit. Human and machine privileges—long a security weak spot—are only getting more challenging to discover and control across this sprawling, decentralized IT landscape, since they can truly reside anywhere. It is easier than ever for attackers to find these security gaps and deliver malicious payloads, including ransomware, or steal credentials.

By compromising the weakest link – a remote worker, contractor, inadequately hardened system, overprivileged user, unmonitored machine identity, unsecured ports, a VPN vulnerability—an attacker can infiltrate an organization. In supply chain attacks, attacks can compromise a target’s software and then use it to infect thousands of customers, as happened with the SolarWinds and Kaseya breaches.

Outside of corporate environments, mobile and remote endpoints are also more exposed to on-device attacks. With thousands to millions of remote and mobile endpoints (whether corporate and employee-owned), used for work, the likelihood of experiencing a stolen or lost device is high.

The attackers’ path of least resistance is shifting. What strategies should over-stretched IT security teams and beleaguered help desks prioritize to reduce cyber risk, while making their organization more adaptable, resilient, and better poised to address the challenges and opportunities of the future?