The pandemic is propelling changes in the cyber landscape which now requires a holistic outlook by cybersecurity operators, says Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity firm.
"The pandemic is accelerating digital transformation and this is leading to a spike in the number of cybercriminals launching broadened attacks in this super-connected cyberspace," Trend Micro co-founder and chief executive Eva Chen said in the virtual conference called "Trend Micro Perspectives 2021".
Cybersecurity solutions need to be transformed, she said.
In 2020, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received more than 2,000 complaints every day about cybercrime. The number of complaints surged 69% year-on-year with a total loss of US$4.2 billion (130.7 billion baht) in 2020.
According to Ms Chen, cybercriminals are launching more attacks.
In 2020, there was a 34% increase in ransomware families and the top sectors affected were government, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education, technology, food and beverage, oil and gas as well as insurance, respectively.
Changes in infrastructure and user behaviour are creating cyber threats.
One such threat is the use of cloud computing, Ms Chen said. More than 56% of organisations have had cybersecurity incidents that involve cloud-native applications -- apps designed specifically for a cloud computing architecture.
Operation technologies -- such as the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) -- are also exposed to cyber threats. Moreover, oil production and pipelines have also come under attack.
Global research firm Gartner predicts that the financial impact of the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) will reach over $50 billion by 2023.
According to Ms Chen, a digital transformation and data-first approach means data is being pulled in from across operations, networks, servers, cloud, emails, IoTs and various devices for analysis and decision making.
Accordingly, cybersecurity needs to take into account the whole value chain.
To equip organisations with anti-cyber attack tools, Trend Micro's "Vision One" threat defence platform offers extended detection and response (XDR) and collects and automatically correlates data across multiple security layers -- emails, endpoint, server, cloud workloads and network -- so that threats can be detected fast.
Vision One enables the gathering of data points which can then be analysed to present an overall security situation, Ms Chen said.
