Will 2022 sustain the sophisticated cyber attacks developed in 2021?

Steve Flynn, Sales and Marketing Director for ESET Southern Africa.

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After two years of unexpected events, how will 2022 stack up against what is becoming a much more sophisticated approach to cyber crime? While cloud technology enjoyed an unprecedented increase in its adoption, entire industries were held back after major cyber attacks. To cap off an eventful 2021, many organisations entered the festive season with some form of threat from the Log4J vulnerability hanging over their heads too. Awareness is, in effect, a form of prevention and understanding the increasing trends, which set the tone for the year to come in cyber security can only help build appropriate defence mechanisms.

As the world continues to move towards the increasingly common distributed workforce and the steady shift towards the cloud, ESET, a global leader in cyber security, says there has been a greater and understandable demand for reliable end-point security with increases in targeted ransomware attacks. Despite the concern that remote computing has caused, it does present an opportunity for many organisations to modernise their infrastructure and move more of the workloads into the cloud. The result, in many instances, is a more reliable, recoverable and scalable infrastructure set not only for its clients but for ESET too.

The cloud is the limit

Although more of a gradual upgrade rather than a dramatic shift, organisations are moving their infrastructure off-premises as they opt for more reliability, the scalability offered from cloud solutions that can adapt to the needs of the business.

Employees are returning to work, but it seems more likely that the new workplace will be more hybrid, necessitating unique security requirements. A far greater emphasis on protecting end-point devices is required as security to the edge is only reasonable in on-premises solutions. As a result, in 2022, it will be necessary for every organisation to evaluate their return to work policies and ensure that the security measures they have in place suit the needs of a hybrid workforce and the protection of their data. Many of the existing security technologies that organisations have in place are inapplicable.

Cyber attacks on small businesses had a massive impact in 2021. Upwards of 60% said they could not recover financially from a severe cyber or ransomware attack. And the massive cyber attacks on the Department of Justice and another South African parastatal, Transnet, in 2021, showed that even large organisations could suffer irreparable harm.

Consequently, there will be increasing demand for high-quality, reputable security software for laptops, which are the backbone for many SMEs and end-user mobile devices.

ESET LiveGuard is a feature that adds a layer of cloud-based protection specifically designed to mitigate threats that are new in the wild by intelligently moving to a protected cloud-based sandbox, virtually eliminating any threat of malware or suspicious scripts unknowingly being opened.

In the partner landscape, ESET provides efficient tools to enable how its partners help their customers with the best support and cloud-based security products.

System-driven efficiencies

The pandemic continues to unsettle activities that partners and clients relied on previously: face-to-face get-togethers and engagements, training and other on-premises support. Support services and training – typically delivered in person in the past – will continue to become the norm to facilitate online, but still, several systems at organisations need to be adapted to facilitate this move.

The benefit of this shift to online-based interactions is that many organisations, including ESET, have found new ways of providing customer support, training and business development, forcing a critical review of many systems and processes.

This fundamental shift will improve efficiency and efficacy in how ESET engages with its partners, clients and customers.

Recently, IDC MarketScape acknowledged ESET for the continued reinvestment of its profits into software development, core threat research and threat hunting. The acknowledgement is a cornerstone of why ESET remains Europe’s favourite cyber security brand and fast becoming a significant player in South Africa, too.

Partnering for success

ESET Southern Africa’s engagement with its partners continues to deliver results. Successful partnerships are the core of a vendor’s success. ESET’s re-imagined engagement platform increased support and dedication to helping managed services providers and resellers achieve their sales goals is expected to build on the success that the company enjoyed in 2022.

We expect this to be helped by excellent new products in the consumer and enterprise cloud space.

Looking ahead

Organisations large and small saw – to some extent – the effects of not having adequate protection in place. Cyber threats are sophisticated, and cyber criminals will stop at nothing to hold a business or individual to ransom, acquire data or steal funds. And cyber crime is increasing unabated.

Sophisticated attacks are going to become more personalised, which will drive an even greater need to protect vulnerable proprietary applications from attack.

Organisations cannot operate today without some form of a protective solution in place regardless of where the infrastructure is located or what device it is on.