Three perspectives on cybersecurity trends as the year ends

October 2022 sees the arrival of the internationally recognised Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This comes at a time of new data breaches and identity theft being announced daily. For businesses, 76 percent of organizations report they have been attacked by ransomware in the past two years.

For 2022, the theme is “See yourself in Cyber?” This is an attempt to draw more people into the professions of IT security. But what does this mean in practice?

To gain a series of industry perspectives, Digital Journal canvassed the views of three leading practitioners. This commentary focuses on the “people” part of cybersecurity.

First up is Matt Holland, Co-founder and CEO of Field Effect:. Holland explains what the recruitment deficit in cybersecurity means: “Despite all of the cyber security tools, categories and offerings on the market, businesses of all sizes continue to be underprotected. They feel overwhelmed and forced into solutions well outside of their areas of expertise.”

In terms of what can be done, he draws on his own businesses experience: “We work with our customers and partners to provide a solution that is holistic in nature; designed to identify vulnerabilities and stop threats across the breadth of the network, cloud services and endpoints; and delivered in a way that removes the noise and complexity and relieves our clients’ burdens.”

The second expert to weigh in is Francis Cianfrocca, CEO at InsightCyber. Cianfrocca predicts that the spate of cybersecurity issues will only increase: “2023 will be the year that hostile cyberattacks against infrastructure and industrial operations become mainstream.”

Cianfrocca asks why this is the case, and answers this self-set question: “As attacks on the hardware and software that monitor and control equipment—otherwise known as operational technology (OT) environments—become more common, the motivation of cyberattackers has evolved from merely disrupting business to compromising the integrity of industrial environments with the malicious intention to cause harm.”

Cianfrocca’s main recommendation is: “To be able to truly manage and mitigate risk from cyber and physical security threats, enterprises must be able to identify the smallest of anomalies to detect suspicious activity to prevent it before they become the next headline.”

The third and final industry insider is Grace Burkard, Director of Operations, ioXt Alliance. Burkard addresses the central theme of Cybersecurity Awareness month, reciting: “The theme of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, ‘See yourself in cyber,’ resonates with well because our alliance serves to promote the importance of increasing the security for IoT products in order to build a safer connected world.”

As to what is so special about IoT, Burkard states: “As IoT devices have taken on critical roles in many industries, it is paramount for IoT manufacturers to incorporate security from the start and take responsibility to implement. ioXt empowers these manufacturers to do just that by certifying their devices to a rigorous set of standards put forth by global security leaders. They’re also provided the opportunity to ‘see themselves in cyber’ by participating in the work groups to have a voice in creating the standards for new profiles. It is never too late to start thinking about security and get involved.”