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Organizations of all sizes, across the world, are constantly under threat of cybersecurity attacks from hackers. Gartner projected “End-user spending for the information security and risk management market is estimated to grow at a current compound annual growth rate of 11.2% from 2020 through 2025 to reach $233 billion in U.S. dollars.”
Continuous refinement of technology has redefined and enabled the user to harness various benefits of digital transformation, on the other hand, it has also provided the same advancement to a hacker who has been sharpening hacking attempts and malware attacks.
In the year 2022, it has become prudent for individuals and companies to be well prepared for tackling ever increasing cyber threats and continue to fine-tune and upgrade security strategies and benchmarks.
One of the solutions is to timely invest in security testing but it would be important to know about the trends to expect this year.
Artificial Intelligence: The key use cases of artificial intelligence are seen in the fraud detection on financial portals and intrusion detection systems. It is very useful in analyzing the data and finding unusual patterns of cyber-attacks on the systems. Artificial intelligence by its core is capable of analyzing humongous amount of data from network traffic to assess possibility of cyber threat on the system.
Given the fact that hackers are trying to utilize machine learning methodologies to automate and implement malicious events in organizations, it is prudent for the organizations to enhance their cyber defense systems by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence.
Ransomware Threat: The year 2021 had seen a spike in ransomware attacks. The UK National Cyber Security Centre reported the number of ransomware attacks increased by three folds in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the whole of 2019. The various reasons attributed to these spikes are due to the increase in financial activities on digital platforms due to the pandemic, enhanced usage of e-commerce and enough controls not in place for employees working from home.
Many companies and governments are still using outdated technologies, processes, protocols, and procedures, which ultimately increases the vulnerability of getting attacked by ransomware. We have to fix these issues with proper budgeting and management alignment, in addition to other measures such as improved security, better monitoring and reporting.
Cloud Security: With the popularity of cloud implementation and moving organizational sensitive data to the cloud, it becomes very important to secure cloud infrastructure. Cloud though is very secure and has several layers of security from user management, network management, to secure key management. It has its own challenges in terms of security, as any security issues on cloud hosted applications will impact the authenticity, integrity and availability of the data.
One trend of year 2022 would be a possible growth in terms of cloud adaptation, it will also mark for newer ways of cyber-attacks on the cloud infrastructure.
Cybersecurity Talent Shortage: Cybersecurity talent is scarce in the market and there is no doubt about it. The increased number of cyber-attacks in the year 2021 has further fueled the demand for trained cybersecurity professionals across the globe. It is unlikely that this gap will be filled in a timely manner, respite may come from artificial intelligence, where it will be used to detect malware in the network by analyzing a vast amount of data more quickly than humans, detecting issues such as phishing attacks, privilege escalations, and insider threats.
Internet of Things: Statista, a market research company, projects global spending of 1.1 Trillion USD by 2023 and consumer spending on smart home systems worldwide in the tune of 123 bn USD by 2021. The risk of cyberthreat is going to increase in the year 2022 with more proliferation of IoT devices. As we all are aware of the high vulnerability of IoT devices owing to different communication protocols, operating systems, integrations and lack of any standardization in space.
Conclusion
IGT with its Security Testing COE is well positioned to achieve shift-left of security testing and thereby finding security vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle, and working with all stakeholders to ensure these vulnerabilities are taken care of before releasing the software on production. IGT cyber assurance covers OWASP, PCI-DSS, HIPPA, ISO 27001 and other standards of cyber security.
Author:
Yatender has 20+ y
ears of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.