* By Flavio Silva
The rise of the pandemic caused by covid-19 has shed new light on the importance of reinforcing cybersecurity aspects for companies and users. With social isolation and massive migration to remote work, many cyber attackers saw an opportunity to intensify threats at points of vulnerability. And in 2021 this scenario is expected to remain high, taking cybersecurity alerts to alarming levels. Security warnings that were already worrying were even more in evidence. If before many companies neglected aspects of information security, we saw in this year of 2020 that the scenario has changed. In the coming year, this point will no longer be just a priority, but will become part of the design of the organizations' business strategy.
A recent study by Trend Micro (Turning the Tide: Security Predictions for 2021) showed that one of the main points of attention in cybersecurity for 2021 will be people who will continue to work remotely. In other words, cybercriminals will turn remote offices into their main axis to attack companies. Because they are connected to equipment, such as routers and computers, with high vulnerability, in addition to other devices connected to the same network that also present risk exposure, these attackers will seek to have access to these devices with the objective of entering corporate environments for the purpose of steal sensitive and confidential information. Features such as botnets will be used extensively by these malicious agents.
This scenario is just the tip of the iceberg when we think about what the context of the current crisis has generated. The pandemic has brought greater concern in terms of cybersecurity as it has been proved that the present and future days are fertile ground for attackers to act. An example of this has been the manipulation of information that uses covid-19 as its central theme. Fake news, e-mail messages and malicious links containing information that could allude users to access it, allowing attackers to compromise personal data. This point will continue to be used as a theme for attackers in the search for victims in 2021.
In addition, with the disruption of companies' physical and local operations due to the pandemic, many companies have migrated part of their routines to the cloud environment. With this, a new alert was created, since the information of the companies, which are generated from their remote employees, has been expanded considerably. In order to have a complete view of the communication system and meet the imposed needs, many organizations are gathering and storing large amounts of data in various sources and environments. These accumulations of data present a high risk of cybercrime. Companies that fail to have a broad view of the corporate devices held by their remote employees, especially when employees access personal applications, are at greater risk.
Given this scenario, an important point to mitigate these risks in 2021 is to promote strong awareness work. Companies should promote training and provide information on methods and possible attack vectors. Reinforcing this knowledge about threats and extending corporate best practices to the home will be essential to ensure a best practice for digital security. The establishment of security rules in remote work, such as not using work devices for personal purposes and using VPNs, are some examples.
Another point of attention concerns how attackers will use newly discovered vulnerabilities to promote malicious actions towards companies. Because they are still unpatched vulnerabilities, cyber criminals will exploit these loopholes in 2021. This will be a major draw for threat agents looking for weaknesses that are available for their use. Furthermore, it is possible to predict that the underworld market for trading or selling exploitable products - in which these vulnerability discoveries are modified according to the needs of the attackers - will be in full swing. In addition, the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will also be risk vectors, especially because they have a security that is still rare. These interfaces have several weaknesses that can be vectors for data breaches in enterprise applications.
In 2021, the attack vectors of companies will be very susceptible. Companies must be clear that their operations depend on mitigating risk for conducting business. This means maintaining restricted access control on corporate networks from the remote work of its employees, as well as focusing on creating corporate policies based on security and incident response. This will strengthen services, teams and corporate data. Another point is to reinforce basic security measures when applying system patches. The weaknesses will only be mitigated over the next few months of remote work. And last but not least, make sure that threat detection is being done constantly by the information security teams, ensuring these responses to incidents on an ongoing basis. All this to preserve workloads in cloud environments and maintain the protection of e-mails, endpoints, networks and servers.
* Flavio Silva, Technology Coordinator at Trend Micro Brasil
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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