Only a few days ago, the film ‘Matrix’ made its way to the silver screen – one of the most celebrated film series that inspired an army of netizens. Portraying hacking at its best way back in 1999 was above and beyond its time. But that was just a work of fiction. Does that mean the real world is any different? Hacking into a system was probably a baby step into building an entire arsenal for future cyber warfare. And, unfortunately, the future is right here.
Considering that cyber-attacks have nearly tripled or more in the recent past makes Ignorance a Bliss no more! Cybersecurity forces had predicted one attack every 11 seconds in 2021. The world had barely made it into the third month of the year, and there had been a 20M breached records noted in March 2021. Researches show that more than 2,200 cyberattack incidents were recorded daily in the same year.
Today, as we stand at the crux of a new year, we wonder what more is left to see. The answer to this will be – A Hell of a Lot More! Reasons being, a mass-scale adoption of digital platforms and shared-cloud space has only made the job easy for hackers and other cybercriminals. In an attempt to create a robust cloud infrastructure, pioneers have just handed the world on a silver plate to these online offenders. Even though modern technology promises 100% safety and security of consumer data, a fail-safe has been created, knowingly or unknowingly, for cyber attackers to do what they feel like. Surprisingly, the new-age technology could not build its arsenal against them. In fact, the world can expect more severe attacks to follow in the coming days, with compensation rising to $6 trillion by the end of 2021 or more moving forward.
Hence, the best bet for the world is to predict what kind of cyberattacks one can/should expect in 2022 and solidify their digital fortresses accordingly. If not, at least put aside trillions of dollars to compensate and mitigate the losses – whichever they deem fit.
Top Cyber-Attack Predictions for 2022
1. Disrupted Essential Medical Supplies
Only recently, the world has received the cruelest blows of Mother Nature. The covid-19 pandemic showed Men could no longer play God. But the cybercriminals are not done yet terrorizing innocent lives even at the cost of millions of deaths. According to James Carter, the chief security officer at LogRhythm predicted that “The supply chain of a major vaccine manufacturer will be halted by ransomware.” He believes, “In 2022, cybercriminals will set their sights on carrying out a ransomware attack against one of the pharmaceutical companies producing the Covid-19 vaccine. This will interrupt the production of critical booster shots and keep many other lifesaving drugs from reaching patients.” The outcome would be even more dramatic – it’ll surely ignite the flame for myriad vaccine disinformation campaigns.
2. Weaponized Malwares
So much for automation and artificially intelligent systems simplifying human lives. Little did mankind realize that someday their greatest find can turn into a Frankenstein. Yes, or so predicted by Chris O’ Ferrell, the chief threat officer of CodeHunter, who had nearly 35 years of experience working in the cybersecurity industry. According to him, “Extremely advanced, AI-driven, weaponized malware will emerge with the capability to circumvent most (if not all) of the defensive and detection security technologies used today.”
3. Reinforced Ransomware
The year 2021 has witnessed record-breaking ransomware payouts, one of them being a $40 million ransom paid by an insurance company. Such instances validate the ROI of ransomware and feed new ideas to wannabe cybercriminals.
And, the worst part is – ransomware has not seized to evolve yet. Experts believe that “in 2022, we’ll see more and more triple extortion ransomware, whereby a ransomware attack experienced by one business, becomes an extortion threat for its business partner. Ransomware attackers won’t stop extorting the victim organization for ransom; they will extort its business partners whose data it holds or business partners who cannot afford the supply chain disruption.”
Companies should take this as a warning and be prepared to face more personalized extortion threats arising from different assets, including IoT and company insiders.
4. Travel to Space & Beyond
The world is standing on the precipice of Space Tourism, and Elon Musk is pushing hard to add Space Travel to the list of Best Places to Visit. Unfortunately, that is already giving scamsters all kinds of scams and phishing ideas. When the world’s richest men are vying with each other to book a seat in a Space Rocket alongside Branson and Bezos, faux websites are cropping up across the Internet to sell you stars. They will promise all kinds of experience in exchange for a modest fee. This is a golden opportunity for these scamsters to harvest personally identifiable information for future use.
5. The Cloud is Under Siege
Taking your work to the cloud is the newest trend today. But the shared cloud space is more vulnerable than the engineers want us to think. Elephant-sized data is uploaded or shared in the cloud every day, including personal information to confidential business data and even confidential Government secrets. Already the year 2021 has witnessed an astronomical increase in cloud-space breaches. According to a recent survey, “more than 250 IT professionals, more than half of all businesses have experienced a security incident related to their cloud-based services.” Even top-notch high-profile businesses have been on the receiving end, one of them being, Alibaba Cloud, the biggest Asian cloud provider. Alibaba suffered a data breach of 1.1 billion records. But the worst news is still yet to come.
In early 2021, the misconfiguration of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service exposed the confidential information of more than a dozen companies. Unfortunately, the outcome can be more devastating. More than 90% of companies remain vulnerable to security breaches, courtesy to misconfigurations, especially remediating issues take more time. Small and medium-sized businesses take 75 days to resolve configuration issues post-discovery, whereas larger firms take 88 days or more.
Even Amazon’s AWS was not spared from the brunt of cybercriminals. In 2019, an attack on AWS user Capital One exposed the personal data of over 100 million users. And, quite recently, Amazon’s S3 cloud service exposed ten years’ worth of data for users belonging to Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia, all thanks to misconfiguration.
So, you see, Cloud is no more a Safe Haven for Personal and Business Data.
6. Accelerated Cyber Crimes with 5G
A former White House employee has already predicted that the 5G network will accelerate cybercrime. Existing cybersecurity issues going unresolved can empower hackers to launch attacks on a massive scale. It won’t take a minute or two for these offenders to immobilize an entire smart city reliant on a 5G network. Most of the countries pan world are rolling out 5G connectivity. Unfortunately, these cities are digging their graves in the coming days.
7. AI – The New Arsenal for Attack
Former White House CIO Theresa Payton made another prediction alongside 5G scams. According to her, “AI will be cyber criminals’ weapon of choice. “And it’s going to continue to help them crack more and more accounts, networks and data stores.”
Remember the AI robots going rogue in the film I Robot? Well! Payton believes hackers can easily breach an AI system and alter its algorithms to manifest a behavior it was not originally designed to portray. That can be a real threat not only to individuals and companies but also to nations.
8. Remote Working is No More a Bliss
Post-pandemic many companies have shifted to the cloud allowing employees to work from remote locations. Some have even adopted a hybrid culture to accommodate the changing times. But remote setup can be a perfect spot for cybercriminals to hunt and kill. This changing workplace culture presents new-found opportunities for attackers who change their approach and re-entering the market with malware-as-a-service campaigns. They will hunt down essential tools used in the distributed workforce to launch their attacks. Virtual private networks and their providers with weak self-security postures or exposed servers will remain vulnerable to such thefts.
9. Cryptocurrency is the Next Best Bet
Recently, Check Point Research has investigated OpenSea to prove it is possible to steal users’ crypto wallets. Blockchain technology was supposed to safeguard the digital money of users. But little did the owners realize that even hackers are growing more knowledgeable than ever. With new technology coming into the mainstream, these miscreants are finding loopholes to weaponize and strengthen their arsenals against ignorant users. Hence, cryptocurrencies, which were once used to extort ransom money, could become the playground for these hackers.
10. Cyberwarfare aka WW3
Fear not – Nostradamus didn’t predict this, nor did Baba Vanga. But, given the rising tension between nations pan world, especially between US and China, a plausible third world war is not hard to predict. However, this war will not be fought with Guns and Men. Rather, the battlefield will be the Cyber Space and Ransomware or DDoS the weapons. China is notorious for cybercrimes, so also Russia, which knows how to leverage new technologies to manipulate and direct malware attempts. One attack on any nation’s essential services can immobilize all and sundry, making them vulnerable to any other form of attack.
Guess 2022 will not be a safe year to live!
Conclusion
Cybercrime can pose an existential risk – that much powerful these cyber-miscreants have become. Lisa Sotto, the head of the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, has warned businesses to stay alert. She said, “Every company, regardless of industry sector, will need to be laser-focused on strengthening their security measures. Boards of directors and C-suites alike have come to understand that the basic protections, such as multi-factor authentication, patching and access controls, are critical— and that cybercrime could pose an existential risk.”
The ten cyberattack predictions mentioned above for 2022 point towards plausible cyberwarfare. But, like Lisa said, that can be averted through tightened security measures and robust infrastructure. Then again, the Internet is vulnerable in nature, so is technology. Cybercriminals will find a way to play around the safety tools. What businesses and nations can do is continuously monitor and take timely measures continuously? And, don’t forget to learn from our past mistakes. Stay alert, stay guarded.
