With the arrival of a new year, new threats also emerge as do new actors and new malware and breach methods. So how will the new year impact IoT and OT security and what new trends will we have to be aware of? Sectrio’s threat research team offers some answers.
Rise of geopolitical threats:
With the worsening geopolitical situation in Europe and the Middle East, we can expect new levels of APT activity in these geographies that will have a spill offer effect on other regions.
Network and device vulnerabilities will get more attention from hackers and businesses:
While hackers will try and exploit these, businesses will try to get more disciplined with respect to patching and scanning schedules. An event similar to the Colonial Pipeline episode and others cannot be ruled out and we expect a major episode on these lines to occur around the second quarter of this calendar year. In instances where the codes are widely used across an industry such as in the instance of Log4j, more application security vulnerabilities will surface.
2022 will be the year of cyber threat intelligence:
Towards the second half of 2021, many businesses were seen shopping for threat intelligence feeds. This exercise will intensify in 2022 as businesses seek to improve their threat detection capabilities to improve their cyber risk management efforts and their overall security profile.
Compliance and standards:
With many nations coming out with IoT and OT security policies, compliance mandates will move from a voluntary exercise to a compulsory one for sectors that are not hosting any critical infrastructure. This means that governments will ask businesses to ramp their cybersecurity measures to align with existing standards like IEC 62443 or new ones that will be enacted. We can therefore expect more compliance regulations to better manage cyber risks including those related to remote/hybrid workforce.
The year of reporting for IoT and OT Security:
As we have seen in the US, reporting after a cybersecurity episode will be made mandatory with clear guidelines on who should know what and when. We expect more incident reporting legislation to be enacted around the world.
Supply chain vetting and internal security practices will turn mainstream and more streamlined:
2021 was the year of supply chain disruption. In 2022, the supply chain situation will stabilize and will result in the adoption of new cybersecurity practices to deepen resilience and to ensure that these are not disrupted from within by supply chain poisoning. Internal security policies will also be strengthened to reduce threats from insiders.
Attack surfaces will continue to expand Thanks to digital transformation and automation.
More IoT and OT cyberattacks will grab headlines:
Businesses will find it difficult to contain information on such attacks and thus we will a rise in the appearance of such reports in the media.
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