Trend Micro report forecasts cyber fightback in 2022

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cybersecurity company, has predicted that global organisations will emerge more alert and better prepared in 2022 thanks to a comprehensive, proactive, cloud-first approach to mitigating cyber risk.

Kevin Simzer, COO at Trend Micro says: "Research, foresight, and automation are critical for organisations to manage risk and secure their workforce. Trend Micro blocked 40.9 billion email threats, malicious files and malicious URLs for customers in the first half of 2021 alone, a 47% year-over-year increase."

Trend Micro researchers predict that threat actors in 2022 will focus ransomware attacks on cloud and datacenter workloads and exposed services to take advantage of the large number of employees continuing to work from home. Vulnerabilities will be weaponised in record time and chained with privilege escalation bugs to drive successful campaigns, according to the report.

Jon Clay, Vice President of threat intelligence for Trend Micro adds: “It’s been a tough couple of years for cybersecurity teams, disrupted by work-from-home mandates and challenged as corporate attack surfaces have exploded in size.

“However, as hybrid work emerges and more certainty returns day-to-day, security leaders will be able to plot a robust strategy to plug gaps and make the bad guys work much harder.”

Trend Micro predicts that in 2022 IoT systems, global supply chains, cloud environments, and DevOps functions will be in the crosshairs and more sophisticated commodity malware strains will be aimed at SMBs. However, it believes that many organisations will be ready for the challenge as they build out and implement a strategy to proactively mitigate these emerging risks via:

·Stringent server hardening and application control policies to tackle ransomware

·Risk-based patching and a high-alert focus on spotting security gaps

·Enhanced baseline protection among cloud-centric SMBs

·Network monitoring for greater visibility into IoT environments

·Zero Trust principles to secure international supply chains

·Cloud security focused on DevOps risk and industry best practices

·Extended detection and response (XDR) to identify attacks across entire networks

Read the full copy of Trend Micro’s 2022 predictions report here.