Watch Out For These 6 Cybersecurity Risks in 2021 

The RSA Conference held annually is the world’s latest meeting of cybersecurity experts. In their most recent meeting, they did an attendee survey of the most significant cybersecurity risks threatening today’s business world. 

Business executives should be on the lookout for the trends highlighted below and remember to hire the best cybersecurity experts for a complete security framework review. 

Fakes And Deep Fakes

Deep fakes are faked audio recordings and videos that seem like the real McCoy. Anyone can easily download programs to make deep fakes, which offers many options for cybercrime. 

For instance, a politician could be duped into making a disastrous comment the week before an election. Or, a phony recording of a CEO could order the accounting department to deposit funds into the crook’s bank account. 

There also are new forms of stalkerware that track cell phone data from consumers to get an idea of their daily activities. This information can be used to make faked videos and audio recordings. Cybersecurity experts are still working on how to counteract these new threats. 

Smartphones Used In Surveillance Attacks

The use of touchless payments and banking apps is growing, so smartphones are used for more financial transactions than ever. This has led to a growth of cell phone surveillance attacks, which put tracking software on mobile devices to watch consumers’ behavior from how they use their smartphones. 

These devious activities allow email fraud or business email compromise. The more the criminal knows about your electronic actions, the easier it is to deliver them a fake email that gets them to download malicious files. Cell phone users need to learn more about how dangerous mobile surveillance is and counter it. 

Ransomware More Sophisticated

Ransomware is evolving. Rather than encrypting any data they can get their hands on, cyber thieves target the most valuable business data for encryption and hold it for ransom. Some experts think that ransomware will eventually be beaten by the good guys, but not quite yet. 

More Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain attacks happen when the crook puts code into a website to steal customers’ personal and financial information. Criminals are getting better at these attacks. In 2019, British Airways was hit with a $240 million fine for a devastating supply chain attack. 

Other major companies have had similar attacks on their supply chains, and more are probably likely. Cybersecurity experts need to enhance protections against harmful code and always be on guard to be found and eliminated. 

DevOps Boosts Security Risks

DevOps is a type of creating code that connects operations and development to enhance software innovation. DevOps is different from regular types of software development, which are slow, monolithic, and tested endlessly. 

DevOps is fast and needs many small changes. But this makes it more vulnerable to security risks. Current security issues can be made bigger and affect the system in new ways. Creating software faster can create new vulnerabilities that developers don’t see. 

The fix is to devise security monitoring into DevOps from the beginning. But this requires a lot of trust and cooperation between the DevOps team and senior management. 

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

There are a growing number of attacks on machine learning and AI. Cybercriminals are studying how networks use machine learning for cybersecurity so they can learn how to pierce them. 

The criminals also are looking at how AI experts attempt to trick image recognition systems. This means you need to know how the ML engine works for the system, then figure out how to fool it and wreck the mathematical modeling. Criminals are using similar methods to trick ML models that are common in cybersecurity. 

How companies respond to these threats in the coming years will be vital to minimizing cybercriminals’ damage worldwide.