For many of us, the Thanksgiving and Christmas period is a chance for some well-deserved downtime. For cybercriminals, not so much. The holiday season is one of the most productive time of the year for the Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) industry. Online retail sales spike around holidays, creating more opportunities to catch people out with phishing emails and spoofed websites.

On Saturday November 13th, hundreds of thousands of recipients received an email from the FBI with the subject line of “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.” Thankfully for the recipients, it turned out the threat described in these emails wasn’t real as, unfortunately, the FBI had suffered an external email breach resulting in fake warning messages being sent out.

Ransomware has quite rightly been one of biggest ongoing stories of 2021 – and not just in the world of cybersecurity. The biggest ransomware cases where major companies have been forced to a halt until they pay a ransom have made global, headline news. The impact to victim organizations is usually financial loss and reputational damage. However, in cases such as the Colonial Pipelines attack, ransomware has caused real-world impacts on the general public too.

For those in the security space or at C-level, you’ve likely seen a recommendation about how to manage encryption and corresponding keys. Or at least something about encryption needing further consideration. Chances are, if you’re reading this you have at least an interest in the topic and are researching relevant products.

Cybersecurity would be so much simpler if criminal groups would stick to the same old tried and tested methods. Sadly, that’s never going to happen – they’re persistent and creative. Instead, cybersecurity teams need to keep up to date with the latest tricks in the criminal playbook. There’s no standing still when it comes to cybercrime.

Supply chains are at the front of everyone’s minds right now. From fuel and food to toys at Christmas – the general public are starting to understand just how finely balanced the global supply chain truly is. Events like microchip shortages in Taiwan and the Ever Given blocking the Suez canal show how interconnected modern economies are, and how dependent our huge populations are on effective supply chains.

I had the pleasure of being at an in-person event recently. Aside from the joy it brought me to simply see people for the three-dimensional beings they are, it was of course incredible to connect with the Information Security community once more. Interestingly, a topic came up in quite a few of my conversations with fellow delegates. And it was one that I wasn’t expecting: encryption. It was often amiable, but on a couple of occasions eyes would roll.

As tech budgets start to return to a pre-pandemic state, it will be interesting to see where priorities have shifted to over the past year and a half – especially when it comes to cybersecurity. We’ve taken a look at a few major industry reports to give you an idea of shifting plans, and where cybersecurity sits as a priority in 2022 budgets.