Comment on World Economic Forum 2022 report from Tenable

The World Economic Forum published its annual global risks report 2022 and cybersecurity failure ranks among the top-10 risks that have worsened since the start of COVID-19 and will continue to be a concern over the next two years as cybercriminals sharpen their techniques. Please find below a comment from Renaud Deraison, CTO and co-founder of Tenable.

“Cybersecurity failure ranks among the top-10 risks that have worsened most since the start of the COVID-19 crisis in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2022. This is unsurprising as widespread dependency on digital systems intensified to facilitate our professional, social and recreational needs during the pandemic. This reliance combined with the continued democratization of the use of digital currencies creates an explosive situation where attackers are financially motivated to ply their trade. Pandora’s box has been opened and organizations are left exposed to cyber vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure, supply chains, businesses – all threatening to disrupt our way of life.

The next two years will truly test the mettle of the world’s digital systems as both skilled and unskilled cybercriminals replicate successful methods of attacks from 2021, take advantage of ransomware-as-a-service kits and go after known but unpatched vulnerabilities. The same things cybersecurity professionals have warned about for years.

If both the public and private sectors don’t increase the barriers to entry by collectively raising the standards of cybersecurity, malicious activities will far outpace societies’ ability to effectively prevent them. We ended 2021 with the disclosure of Log4SHELL, one of the biggest, most critical vulnerabilities in the history of modern computing and we anticipate the full impact of that flaw to be realised in 2022 and beyond.

In the digital age, trust is easily lost and hard to gain. Organizations must do everything they can to demonstrate strong corporate governance around cybersecurity and weave it into the fabric of their digital infrastructure. If organizations are still relying on cyber strategies from two years ago, the increasing numbers of cyberattacks provides an impetus to rethink their approach to managing cyber risk in this new normal.”