Nearly 59 percent of firms have accelerated their transition to digitization, while public cloud investment and usage are experiencing unprecedented growth and expansion. Regarding digital, there is also a seismic shift in client expectations. However, the business environment remains unstable and unsettled. Inevitably, decisions undertaken for short-term profit will result in longer-term anguish, because such hasty decisions tend to bite back. Recent research indicates that nearly cyber threats of cyberattacks in the past year can be ascribed to the technology adopted during the pandemic.
The Information Security Forum (ISF) now believes that enterprises’ hasty adoption of technologies to manage customer and employee expectations to speed digital transformation may eventually lead to a dead end. Businesses will face three big cyber threats by 2024 as a result of today’s hasty technology selections.
Cyber Threats 1: The Cloud Risk Bubble Pops
As this strategy begins to impede businesses’ ability to innovate and respond to incidents, it will be viewed as having a hidden and escalating cost, even though it provides them with several advantages.
Due to their dependency on particular cloud platforms and their partners, organizations will discover that their technology alternatives are constrained and their ability to swap suppliers is restricted. Moreover, several unanticipated trust-related challenges, including governance, compliance, security, predictable pricing, performance, and robustness, may emerge.
As global privacy standards tighten, data sovereignty has become a big worry. Businesses that do not comply with local legislation risk litigation, investigations, and penalties, as well as the loss of their competitive edge, reputation, and customers’ faith and confidence. In addition, cloud mismanagement and misconfigurations (likely as a result of a growing cloud skill shortage) will continue to pose a significant threat to businesses; an estimated 63% of security incidents are attributed to cloud misconfigurations.
Cyber Threats 2: Activists Turn to Cyberspace
Social movements fueled by social media are not new, but ISF believes that in the next years, traditional activists will increasingly employ cybercriminal attack tactics to score political points and stop what they view as immoral or unneeded business or government action. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is a prime example of this, as worldwide hacktivists are assisting Ukraine by collaborating on internet forums and attacking Russian infrastructure, websites, and key individuals with dangerous software and debilitating cyberattacks.
Activists may be motivated by moral, religious, or political convictions; they may also serve as puppets of rogue nations or political regimes seeking competitive advantage or influence in global affairs. As factories, plants, and other industrial installations exploit the potential of edge computing, 5G, and IoT, online activism will enter a new phase in which so-called “hacktivists” will target and disrupt key infrastructure more frequently.
Cyber Threats 3: Misplaced Confidence Masks Low-Code Threats
The lack of resources and software developers is spawning no-code and low-code technologies – platforms that non-developers can use to construct and modify apps. 70 percent of new apps will be developed utilizing low-code and no-code technologies by 2025, according to Gartner.
Nevertheless, low-code/no-code solutions pose some significant hazards. As these technologies pervade enterprises, the difficult task of ensuring that app and code developers adhere to security rules will be compromised. Enthusiastic users eager to get their projects off the ground will use these tools without the scrutiny of IT teams, thereby creating shadow development communities ignorant of compliance demands, security standards, and data protection regulations. A recent study indicates that governance, trust, application security, visibility, and knowledge/awareness are among the primary concerns mentioned by security experts about low-code/no-code technologies.
How Can Organizations Safeguard Themselves?
ISF recommends best practices that can aid in mitigating the hazards listed above:
Organizations must seek internal clarity around their cloud strategy and verify that it aligns with their targeted business results. Shortly, enterprises should inventory their cloud footprint to establish their present level of integration and to identify any potential lock-ins. Next, they must build the proper governance for cloud orchestration to comprehend the whole footprint and maintain control over its sprawl. Long-term, businesses must maintain specialized in-house or third-party teams to oversee the development of the cloud from the perspectives of supplier management and technical architecture and operations. They must discover and comprehend single points of failure, then protect against them by including redundancy and parallel processing.
Practitioners of security must have a holistic picture of how their business operates and evaluate the likelihood of being targeted. When compiling a list of possible enemies, ethical and geopolitical considerations must be taken into account. In addition, they must collaborate with threat-intelligence teams to discover early indicators of compromise, perform purple team exercises on remote installations to test whether they can resist attacks, and monitor access to mission-critical information assets to dissuade malicious insiders. To prevent multi-vector attacks, it is also crucial that they establish partnerships with different departments.
Investigations must be conducted to identify applications developed with no-code or low-code tools. This begins with setting policies and processes, followed by an assessment of the organization’s use of no-code/low-code tools and the identification of applications produced with them. Some employees may be unaware that they are using them, or they may fail to disclose their use. Therefore, this pertains to training, awareness, and monitoring. It is also suggested that security teams evaluate data usage per application to determine if corporate data and information are accessed by these tools or their offspring. This is a major undertaking that should not be taken lightly.
In truth, technology is evolving so rapidly that it is practically difficult to account for all security concerns. Companies require proactive risk management. This requires regular assessments of the current state of your organization, your vulnerabilities, your security priorities, and the security training of your employees and partners.
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