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.
No matter how you slice it, the use of containers and Kubernetes continues to swell. And recent high profile vulnerabilities-that-shall-not-be-named have shown us how important container security is for an overall application security program. Protecting your own code, your dependencies, and the containerized services you use are all a must.
With great automation, comes great risk. The advent of infrastructure as code brought about automation for the tedium of deploying, provisioning, and managing resources in public clouds with declarative scripts. However, this automation increased the importance of creating secure IaC scripts or configurations with cloud infrastructure misconfigurations being cited as the biggest area of increased concern (58%) from 2020 to 2021 in the 2021 Snyk Cloud Native Application Security report.
The recently discovered Log4j vulnerability has serious potential to expose organizations across the globe to a new wave of cybersecurity risks as threat actors look to exploit this latest vulnerability to execute their malicious payloads using remote code execution (RCE). An immediate challenge that every organization faces is simply trying to understand exactly where you have applications that are using this very popular Java library — but you are not facing this challenge alone.