I am writing this from my home office in Texas. Texas isn’t just my home. It is the home of the best brisket on the planet, some of the most iconic high tech brands in the world, and energy production that powers the global economy. In the morning, I might meet with one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the country about achieving the rigorous FedRAMP certification so they can sell to federal agencies.

Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, recently published the 2021 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) report. The report, which is Europol’s flagship strategic product that provides a law enforcement focused assessment of evolving threats and key developments in the area of cybercrime, highlights the expansion of the cyber threat landscape due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated digitization.

Protecting our critical infrastructure against the threat of ransomware remains a top priority for both the private sector and the federal government. In fact, a recent survey from Tripwire found that security professionals in both sectors still identify ransomware as a top security concern. More than half (53%) of respondents in that study said they were most concerned about ransomware, for instance.

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

In part one of our 2022 cybersecurity predictions series, Devo CSO Gunter Ollmann explained the rise of XDR, the detection-as-code and response-as-code movement, and the growing interest in security tools with built-in, on-demand expertise. In this second installment of our series, I share my take on how the cybersecurity landscape will evolve. Let’s dive into it.

At many organizations, the surprise discovery that the widely used Apache log4j open source software has harbored a longtime critical vulnerability was as if Scrooge and the Grinch had teamed up for the biggest holiday heist of all. Incident response teams across the globe have scrambled to remediate thousands, if not millions of applications. “For cybercriminals this is Christmas come early,” explained Theresa Payton, former White House CIO and current CEO of Fortalice Solutions.