The importance of cybersecurity is not exaggerated by any means. Economic uncertainty, the unstable geopolitical landscape and cloud migration all factor into the importance of having a strong cybersecurity posture. With those things casting shadows over cybersecurity, one question comes to mind. What direction does cybersecurity head toward in 2023?
Insights from Venafi’s Kevin Bocek, vice of security strategy and threat intelligence; Matt Barker, president of cloud native solutions; Yana Blachman, threat intelligence specialist; Sitaram Iyer, senior director of cloud native solutions; and Pratik Savla, lead security engineer, give a clearer picture on what to expect for the year ahead.
Russian cyberattacks aim to disrupt the economies of western countries. This is expected as Russia is excluded from the international finance community. The U.S. Treasury is already seeing these attacks in the form of DDoS attacks from Russian hacker group Killnet.
But the disrupted geopolitical landscape does not stop there in relation to cybersecurity risks. Nation state attacks are expected to be more feral as ground war tactics become more untamed and unpredictable. What this does is bring the cyber and physical worlds into a collision course.
“These will have the potential to spill over into other nations, as Russia becomes more daring, trying to win the war by any means – and could be used as a distraction to target other nations with cyberattacks,” said Bocek.
While the economy is the topic, recession plays a vital role in the future of cybercrime. More people who would not normally participate in cybercrimes become desperate in recessions, mainly for income. They can potentially see cybercrime as a source of income in 2023.
“Ransomware-as-a-Service and Malware-as-a-Service will rise, as they enable people that don’t have technical skills to launch attacks,” said Blachman.
Additionally, API security is expected to become a top priority as organizations move to an API-first software development approach. Savla said that this exponential adoption of APIs exacerbates security concerns, with the potential to cause significant security breaches.
On a more positive note, platform engineering teams are on the rise as they build on the learnings of DevOps culture, encompassing every persona needed to build and run IT infrastructure. Efforts to manage the risk posed by software supply chain attacks also are expected to continue with more start-ups and open source tools, like cosign and sigstore.
But, as more innovative cybersecurity solutions come into the fold and knowledge of cloud risk is increased, Blachman issues a warning that breaches that went rogue in the past months or years might show themselves.
So, the message is clear as the alarms ring for everyone: Caution needs to be taken with cybersecurity in 2023 – more than ever.
Edited by
Erik Linask
