Six Cyber Threats to Watch.

As the world becomes more connected and digital, cybersecurity is becoming more complicated. As an experienced security expert, we know how challenging it can be to prioritise your security efforts. Keeping up with today’s threats means securing every area of vulnerability, including email, identity, endpoint, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and the external attack surface.

Here are six things you need to know to prevent compromise. ​

1. Email remains a top vector and a focus area for defence

In 2022, 35% of ransomware involved the use of email.¹ Phishing attacks increased by 61% from 2021 to 2022.² Attackers are commonly using legitimate resources to carry out their campaigns. It’s getting harder to tell the difference between real and malicious emails.​

Using safeguards like URL checking and disabling macros will help strengthen your security posture. Tackling more advanced email threats requires that you correlate email signals into broader incidents, visualise the attack, and understand how attackers are taking advantage of other parts of the environment to leverage legitimate resources.

2. The expanded identity landscape also expands opportunities for threat actors

Attackers are getting more creative in circumventing multi-factor authentication (MFA), and phishing kits have made it even easier to steal credentials. The fact is, managing the identity attack surface is more than just securing user accounts. You also need to cover cloud access and workload identities too. For instance, attackers frequently get access to third-party accounts and then use those credentials to infiltrate the cloud and steal data. Often, this is accomplished through workload identities, which can be overlooked in permissions auditing.​

3. Hybrid environments and shadow IT have increased endpoints blind spots

The sheer number of devices in today’s hybrid environments has made securing endpoints more challenging. Unmanaged servers and BYOD contribute to the shadow IT landscape—and are particularly appealing to threat actors. And it only continues to grow.

4. IoT devices are proliferating, and so are IoT threats

IoT devices are an often overlooked endpoint attack vector. Interestingly, as organisations harden routers and networks to make them more difficult to breach, IoT devices are becoming a threat target of choice. For instance, an IoT device can exploit vulnerabilities to turn IoT devices into proxies—using an exposed device as a foothold onto the network. Frequently, organisations often have no visibility into IoT devices, and can even contain dangerous vulnerabilities, such as outdated, unsupported software.​

There are emerging regulations for IoT security in various countries, but it’s vital to gain more visibility into all your attack surfaces—and that includes IoT devices.

5. Protecting the cloud is critical, but complex

Organisations are increasingly moving infrastructure, application development, workloads, and data to the cloud. This radical shift has increased the number of new attack vectors for cybercriminals to exploit, with many gaining access through gaps in permissions security. Cloud app development is a top cloud attack vector. So is cloud storage. And sometimes, cloud services providers themselves can be affected.​

For app development, we recommend embracing a “Shift-left” security approach—that is, thinking about security at the earliest phases of app development.

6. Securing the external attack surface is an internet-scale challenge

Today, an organisation’s external attack surface spans multiple clouds, complex digital supply chains and massive third-party ecosystems. It also extends beyond its own assets, and includes suppliers, partners, unmanaged personal employee devices, and newly acquired organisations. Fact is, the internet is now part of the network, and despite its almost unfathomable size, security teams must defend their organisation’s presence throughout the internet to the same degree as everything behind their firewalls.​

How we can help

As a Microsoft Solutions partner and a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), we have the expertise to assess, pilot, and deploy the right security solutions for your business, along with a variety of managed services to help streamline your security operations. ​Want to learn more about what we can do to help? Contact us today via the form below.

Content originated from Microsoft.