Hybrid work trend ensures another year of online vulnerability

Secon Cyber predicts 2022 will be another eventful year of vulnerability exploits, account takeover attacks, phishing, and ransomware. 

With the easing of Covid restrictions and much of the workforce back in the office, many people find themselves in the position of choosing between working remotely or splitting their time between the office and home. 

“This work-life shift means that businesses need to continue to be vigilant and address the multiple vulnerabilities that still linger,” says Secon chief security evangelist, Andrew Gogarty.

“Over the last two years, organisations have quickly pivoted to remote working and accelerated cloud adoption to support business continuity during the global pandemic. This anywhere access to business-critical data resulted in security gaps and created challenges in maintaining effective cybersecurity.”

He says that as reports of multiple breaches and ongoing ransomware threats continue, Secon has highlighted ten core security risks businesses need to address throughout 2022:

Ransomware: Ransomware continues to impact organisations and remains an ongoing concern. Many organisations have matured their backup and recovery approaches over the last few years with a view of being able to recover their data and environments should ransomware break through defences. Secon says this approach has helped affected organisations avoid paying ransom demands to recover their data. However, ransomware will continue to prevail as one of the most significant risks to organisations. 

Cloud Breaches: “The Cloud helps organisations improve agility through expedited application rollouts, leverage automation and integrations to simplify operations, and ultimately reduce costs to increase revenues,” says Gogarty.

“As cloud adoption continues to increase throughout 2022, we expect to see an increase in unauthorised access and data breaches due to avoidable security gaps presented by misconfigurations and human error.” 

Vulnerability exploits: The growth in zero-day exploits is likely to become a bigger problem for security operations teams to manage going forward. As a result, Secon expects to see increased adoption of Zero Trust in 2022 to help…