By Riaan de Villiers, Business Analyst at LAWTrust Information Security Solutions

The pandemic has forced organisations across all industries to be versatile and agile to meet current and future challenges. As employees continue to work remotely, cybercriminals are also finding more innovative techniques to attack their systems. It is expected that dealing with these new attacks will place an increased burden on cybersecurity professionals this year.

Crucial to digital transformation is cloud computing. The agility and scalability that the cloud provides will allow organisations to respond quicker to new opportunities. But the move to the cloud comes with challenges for organisations – if not handled properly, it can expose the organisation to data breaches and other security threats.

Looking into the New Year, businesses can expect a number of cyber trends to arise.

Here are cybersecurity trends to look out for:

·         Due to the continuing global pandemic many people are still working remotely, and this has made them a target for cybercriminals since their home offices are sometimes not as secure as corporate networks.

The trend of cybercriminals’ attempts to compromise the computers of users working from home in the hopes that they can infiltrate the user’s corporate network from there started in 2020 and is set to continue throughout 2021.

·         It is expected that this year we will see many security issues, challenges, misconfigurations and outages due organisations rushing to complete their move to the cloud.

It is also expected that several companies’ digital transformation projects will implode as their security challenges keep mounting.

Here are cybersecurity tips that companies can use to keep safe:

·         Watch for phishing emails

Phishing emails are emails that look like they are from a legitimate source but is actually from a cybercriminal. The goal of phishing email is to try and steal the victim’s credentials or infect their computer with malware.
So be wary of unexpected emails requesting you to click on a link or download an attachment.

·         Keep your software up to date

Updated software are less likely to be compromised than software that is out of date.

·         Awareness training.

As always, it is important for organisations to educate and teach their personnel about the threats that they are likely to face.