EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
IGNACIO TRIANA , MCA TREND MICRO ,
ENGINEERING MANAGER
The past 12 months have stunned many in the cybersecurity community . Practically overnight business models and work practices were abruptly reconfigured and all IT staff were enlisted to help . As the months passed , new threats emerged and little by little we realized that this is a new reality with which we must live together for some time .
are the priority , so as consumers continue their lives online , industries such as retail and gaming could be under intense pressure , especially if new applications containing vulnerabilities are released .
While the threats will continue to be targeted at remote workers and infrastructure , there are reasons to be optimistic . Unlike last year , we are more familiar with what it is to live and work under the shadow of the pandemic . So this should make things easier for security leaders to prioritize employee training and adopt solutions with greater visibility to improve detection and response to support the business and minimize risk .
It may be an atypical year , but in many ways organizations will continue to see the same cyberthreats during 2021 . Data theft and ransomware , often in the same attack , Business Email Compromise ( BEC ), Trojan attacks for banking , cryptomining , among others , are part of the threat scale .
Trend Micro blocked more than 27.8 billion threats in the first half of 2020 alone , most of which emerged from email . And while most of these can be linked to automated attacks , they can be argued to be more personalized and targeted threats , which pose the greatest danger to revenue and corporate reputation .
Some sectors will be more affected than others during 2021 , as cybercriminals always attack easy targets first . Opportunities to generate maximum ROI
That means that malicious actors will continue to direct their attacks towards the perceived weakest links such as teleworkers and remote work infrastructure .
Phishing has been present for the past decade and COVID-19 themed lures are expected to continue .
As discovered last year , many remote workers could be making criminals ’ work much easier through risky behaviors such as uploading corporate data to the cloud without security , using non-work-specific apps and using potentially unprotected personal devices to work .
Phishing has been present for the past decade and COVID-19 themed lures are expected to continue .
We need to be more alert in 2021 because there are signs that the cybercrime community is gaining more and more capabilities to use ATP-style tactics to steal data and deploy ransomware . This is why it is also important to maintain strict information access controls and finally focus efforts on managing and patching workloads .
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