2021 was a devastating year for cybersecurity. As business accelerated digital adoption and people played out their lives online, threat actors were ready to capitalize on the transitional moment, savagely targeting and exposing personal information and even shutting down entire business operations for any number of hours or days. The growing sophistication of these attacks has led various organizations to clamp down on cyber criminals—the back-and-forth affair defining the cybersecurity trends we’re experiencing today.

Cyberattacks are now the fastest growing crime on a global scale. Financial losses from cybercrime exceed the total losses incurred from the global trade of all illegal drugs. Hence, it comes as no surprise that individuals and organizations operating on the web live in fear of potential hacking scenarios and data breaches. Aside from financial losses, such forms of cyber-attacks can lead to reputation damage as well. Consumer data, when compromised, can subject businesses to strict regulations and costly settlements.

Half of these cyberattacks are targeting small businesses that usually don’t have sufficient cybersecurity measures to protect themselves from such threats. In this week’s insight, we explore five of the top Cybersecurity Trends for 2022/2023:

• User Awareness: Did you know that 97% of the people in the world still cannot identify a phishing email, while 1 in 25 people click such emails, thus, falling prey to cyberattacks?

• Geo-Targeted Phishing Threats: Phishing attacks are currently the most pervasive security threat to the IT sector, with many still falling victim to phishing emails. Since cybercriminals use more advanced methods to create well-executed business email compromise attacks (BEC), phishing emails and malicious URLs remain prevalent on the web, except that they are now highly localized, more personalized, and are geo-targeted. It is also important to note that last year alone saw more than 60,000 phishing websites and 1 in every 8 employees sharing information on a phishing site.

• Cloud Security: With the help of the best cloud management software solutions, more and more businesses and organizations are migrating to the cloud. However, most cloud services right now do not offer secure encryption, authentication, and audit logging. Some also fail to isolate user data from other tenants sharing space in the cloud. Therefore, IT security professionals see the need to tighten cloud security. Poor configuration of cloud security can lead to cybercriminals bypassing internal policies that protect sensitive information in the cloud database. Accordingly, security in the cloud is progressing into predictive and innovative security to combat cyber attackers. Predictive security is becoming useful in identifying threats before attackers begin their move. It can pinpoint attacks that pass through other endpoint security. As a result, businesses are implementing predictive security cloud, with the market gaining a 261% ROI for over three years now.

• Mobile Devices as Attack Vectors: These days, nearly everyone uses smart mobile devices—66.6% of the world population as of 2021, to be specific (Data Reportal, 2021). Most leading ecommerce software and platforms are accessible through mobile platforms. Cybercriminals, however, see this as an opportunity to target mobile users and use mobile devices as attack vectors. Mobile devices are becoming a great channel of opportunity for cybercriminals as users continue to use their mobile devices for personal and business communications, as well as banking, shopping, flight, or hotel bookings. These devices became targets of cyberattacks. According to the RSA’s Current State of Cybercrime whitepaper, about 70% of fraudulent transactions originated from mobile platforms, with popular mobile attack vectors including malware, data tampering, and data loss.

• Finance Sector Being Hit Hard – The financial services sector is one of the main industries facing cyber threats daily. It doesn’t help that some financial organizations are still struggling to keep pace with cloud migration and the increasing number of regulations. Phishing attacks remain prevalent in the financial services sector, but it’s no longer just via emails. Phishing through social media and other messaging platforms is now among the cybersecurity trends in financial services. Aside from phishing attacks, the most common threats faced by insurance companies, banks, and asset managers include malware attacks and data breaches. Moreover, cyber-attacks on financial institutions spiked by a massive 238% from the beginning of February to the end of April 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

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