Before the pandemic, most millennials didn’t have a will, let alone a plan for handing over their digital accounts.

In the early days of Styra when we were creating Open Policy Agent (OPA), we had a singular goal in mind: help engineers enforce any policy over any piece of software. We wanted people to be able to write any policy they’d like, whether it be about complex resources managed by Kubernetes or public cloud, APIs routed through gateways or service meshes, data stored in relational or document databases, application deployments controlled by CICD pipelines, and so on.

Cybersecurity threats are on the rise. Over the past year, we’ve observed a 148% increase in ransomware attacks and an 85% increase in phishing attacks targeting remote users. Worse still, these attacks are growing increasingly sophisticated, with threat actors using eight or more vectors in the same attack, often deploying multiple vectors within minutes of one another.

In an increasingly cloud native world, infrastructure as code (IaC) is often the first point of entry into an application. And with technologies such as Kubernetes and Terraform becoming increasingly popular, most app developers will update at least one Kubernetes or Terraform resource at one point in their career.

The SolarWinds attack in late 2020 exposed the data of more than 18,000 businesses and governmental departments – many of which are gatekeepers for the country’s most vital infrastructure. While attacks against the software supply chain aren’t new, they are increasing exponentially.

While data breaches are never good news for any business, they can be especially catastrophic in the financial industry. The sheer amount of sensitive personal data that moves through the average banking institution on a normal day creates a seductive target for cybercriminals and a potential nightmare for security administrators. As a result, finding the right cybersecurity solution that can be tailored to the needs of financial institutions a must.

In 2021, the cybersecurity industry was truly tested. Most notably, we uncovered the deeper fallout from the SolarWinds attacks, combatted the proliferation of advanced ransomware gangs and a surge in vulnerability exploitation, and saw fragile supply chain and critical infrastructure more targeted by attackers than ever. As global cyber defenders, predicting where the broad industry could be heading is a daunting task.

At the beginning of 2021, Emotet was considered to be the world’s most dangerous malware by Europol. The threat was first discovered in 2014 when it was acting as a banking trojan. Over the years, the malware evolved into one of the most relevant botnets in the threat landscape, often used to deliver other threats, such as Trickbot and Ryuk ransomware. Netskope detected Emotet during Oct 2020, using PowerShell and WMI to download and execute its payload.

It is prediction time once again, and we’ve polled some of our esteemed experts here at Netskope to see what’s piquing their interest with 2022 on the horizon. Much like our predictions last year, we’ve broken the list out into some longer shots and some pretty safe bets. Here’s what we think is in store for 2022.

The abuse of Google Drive to deliver malicious content continues, and two recent examples remind us how the flexibility of this cloud storage tool can be easily weaponized by malicious actors. And the spectrum of content that can be distributed, and victims that can be targeted is surprising.