It’s finally happening. More than a year after embarking on “the world’s largest work-from experiment,” many businesses are bringing people back to the office. For some, this is excellent news. They’ve been looking forward to highway commutes, in-person meetings, and always valuable watercooler talk. These people are in the minority.
Looking back at the past year, there have been some downright spooky trends facing cyber security professionals. Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, impacting organizations from healthcare to critical infrastructure to the suppliers of MSP suppliers and everyone in between. APT crews and criminal gangs have taken advantage of the pandemic that pushed everyone to remote work, making 2020/2021 the year that bad cybersecurity preparedness came home to roost.
The number of data breaches has increased every year for more than a decade. Each incident costs companies time, money and resources to repair while inflicting often-irreparable damage to their brand reputation and customer loyalty. This reality only became more apparent during the recent pandemic as threat actors capitalized on the moment’s disruption and uncertainty to wreak havoc on our digital environments. In 2021, the number of data breaches is already on pace to reach a new record high.
This October, as businesses emerge from the pandemic, many are making strategic decisions about their long-term work arrangements. While there is a substantial debate about remaining remote or bringing people back to the office, many companies are choosing to meet in the middle, embracing a hybrid work arrangement that allows people to work both on-site and remotely.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which means that companies are once again surveying the threat landscape. They can’t like what they see. By July 2021, threat actors attempted more than 304 million ransomware attacks, surpassing the 2020 total just halfway through the year. At the same time, the number of phishing scams is soaring, and the cost of a data breach is more expensive than ever before, reaching $4.24 million, according to the most recent industry study.
Already a significant concern before 2021, this year has revitalized cybersecurity as a top priority for every organization. Highly consequential cybersecurity incidents at companies like Colonial Pipeline, Kaseya, and T-Mobile brought front-page coverage to the issue, while cybersecurity attacks on small and medium-sized businesses soared, spreading the reach of threat actors.
Despite the steady drumbeat of hacks that are reported on a nearly weekly basis, it is safe to say that cybersecurity is still far from a “top of mind issue” for most people. Massive data breaches like Equifax, Marriott, and many, many more are chalked up to being yet another part of the modern life. While each of those cybersecurity incidents was quite serious in its own right, for the public whose data were compromised, they represented more of an inconvenience than a serious concern.
Cyber attacks, like the pandemic that has spurred the rise in incidents, have been relentless. Over the past eight months, there has been a significant escalation as the sophistication of these attacks has risen. Hackers are going after key vendors, allowing them to target wide swaths of valuable victims like we have seen in the attacks on SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, Colonial Pipeline, and more recently, MSP software provider Kaseya.
The pandemic hastened long-developing trends toward digitization and decentralization. As virus concerns, social distancing guidelines and convenience pushed people online, ecommerce sales surged, expected to hit $4.2 billion globally this year, jumping ahead by years in the process. To be sure, this isn’t a one-time trend. According to one survey , nearly half of shoppers who altered their shopping habits in 2020 plan to make those changes permanent.
Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.
