Contents:
Today I’m sharing insights on how Heimdal stays ahead of the curve in the cyberthreat landscape. We’ll also discuss what can be expected in the following years in terms of cybersecurity, so keep reading and feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments section at the end of this article if something has caught your attention!
What to Expect in the Following Years, According to Gartner
The cybersecurity predictions from Gartner indicate a few interesting aspects – we should expect more regulations and more responsibility of the C-level executives for cybersecurity matters, an interest in simplifying IT teams’ work by opting for unified security products, which, curiously, has been a direct part of the Heimdal strategy since 2019, and an increase in the level of threat that cyberattacks pose (such increase that we’ll probably see human casualties).
More privacy regulations for consumers
As Gartner notes, “By 2024, 75% of the global population will have its personal data covered under privacy regulations”. The top 5 privacy trends that they observed are data localization, privacy-enhancing computation techniques, AI governance, centralized privacy UX, and remote becoming “hybrid everything”.
Unification of cloud services and private applications into a single vendor SSE platform
According to Gartner, businesses will move toward greater integration, fewer consoles, and fewer places for data decryption, analysis, and re-encryption over the course of the next few years.
Zero-Trust will become the norm
For a few years, everyone in cybersecurity, including Heimdal, has started talking about Zero-Trust, the approach where all computing infrastructure is devoid of implicit trust. Zero-Trust is both a security tenet and an organizational Modus Operandi, so it’s only natural for it to require “a cultural shift and clear communication that ties it to business outcomes”, as Gartner notes.
Cybersecurity risks analysis before any collaboration with third-parties
Cybersecurity risks related to third parties have been on the rise and rightly so. Supply-chain attacks are likely to become more and more commonplace because it’s an area where you can easily gain access to large-scale businesses. Again a topic that we have flagged before an analyst house like Gartner. Fortunately, businesses will start paying more attention to this – of their own will or forced by the increasing regulations.
New regulations for ransomware payments and negotiations
As Gartner mentions, paying or not paying the ransom in case of an attack is not only a matter of security, but an important “business-level” decision. Therefore, ransomware victims should discuss it with incident response professionals, as well as police forces and regulatory entities.
Cyberattacks will cause human casualties
Sadly, it was only a matter of time before cyberattacks claimed human lives. We know that authorities think a woman’s death was caused, in part, by delayed medical care after hackers broke into a hospital’s computer system. This incident that happened in the fall of 2020 in Germany may represent the first ransomware-related death.
Another prior instance involved a ransomware attack that was directed at an Alabama hospital and that rendered its computer systems inaccessible for more than a week.
During a birth procedure, a fetal heart rate change that was noted on a piece of paper printed by the bedside monitor went unnoticed by the nurses. The procedure would have become a C-section if it had appeared normally on a large digital display at the nurses’ station, where monitoring was much simpler.
The baby girl’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck when she was born, obstructing her airway and seriously damaging her brain. Nine months later, she passed away.
As Gartner suggests, it’s time to stop focusing solely on information theft and start considering the potential real-world effects of cyberattacks.
Organizations will start building resilience from various physical and technological threats
In addition to warning about the danger that cyberattacks pose to the physical world, Gartner predicts that CEOs will begin putting more emphasis on building organizational resilience in order to withstand converging threats from cybercrime, extreme weather, civil unrest, and geopolitical tensions.
C-level executives will be held responsible for cybersecurity risks
C-level executives’ increased responsibility for cybersecurity risks is another aspect of the role that they will play. Senior business leaders should take over from the security leader as the traditional arbiters of how to handle cyber risks, according to Gartner.
The difference in view between Heimdal and Gartner
Clearly, we here at Heimdal have predicted a lot of the trends that analysts now also believe will come to fruition, before they started seeing the trend – and hence we naturally agree on a lot of them, but where do we differ? What is actually not yet a noticeable trend, but something that is happening in the market, and how does that tie to our strategy and what we believe in doing for our business customers over the next 2-5 years? Let’s have a look at the Heimdal strategy and see.
Heimdal Cybersecurity Strategy
Gartner being in line with our predictions and vice versa, we too encourage companies to pay extra attention to the possible real-life consequences of cyberattacks in the following years. As always, I’m an advocate of prevention, and I’m certain that implementing security policies is always preferable to mitigating attack aftereffects.
The Heimdal cybersecurity strategy that we propose to our customers places a strong emphasis on ransomware prevention, privileged access management, and the crucial concept of Zero-Trust while also staying on top of the threats and trends that I anticipate in 2023 and beyond.
Moving forward with unification
When we put ourselves in the place of the customer and we try to think “what would really help me, if I was having their problems?” – that’s when we make pivotal changes. The advantages of a unified cybersecurity suite are absolutely staggering, and companies that adopt it, whether we’re talking about small and medium-sized businesses or multinationals with thousands or millions of employees, can see significant returns on their investments.
To this end, Heimdal has made significant investments into what we believe will change the course of cybersecurity (something which we hope to release later this year), where we take our already unified platform and give it another user-friendly, more automated, yet still mindblowing dimension. Stay tuned for that.
Moving into the technology in more detail, we must also be mindful of the fact that, as a vendor-wide platform, we might not be able to be the best in our breed in all respects. Instead, we must concentrate our efforts where we believe they will have the highest impact on the customer, which for us means preventing the attacker from ever reaching the desktop and/or gaining access to privileged credentials.
Hence, we truly believe that we have a superb unified platform, but something where it really stands out is DNS security, Patch and Asset Management, Ransomware Prevention, and Privilege Access Management, specifically for Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management, but naturally we tie those into Antivirus, Application Control, Email Security and Email Fraud Prevention for additional value.
Within a dashboard that combines intelligence from several or all of the Heimdal solutions, IT administrators, CIOs, and CISOs can use this unification to monitor the enterprise’s cybersecurity state, manage threats, and respond to them as quickly as possible. However, in the long run, it’s not just about unification; it’s also about the time saved by having a user-friendly platform that doesn’t tie itself in knots when trying to solve a problem.
Increasing compliance and enhancing security with Privileged Access Management and Zero-Trust
In the Heimdal suite, the Zero-Trust Execution Protection is a cross-module component included in three of the main modules: Privileged Access Management, Application Control and Next-Gen Antivirus. The module enables the intelligent diagnosis of all processes that are running in the IT environment of customers to identify and stop malicious or suspicious executions, because we know that we could not possibly predict future malware with 100% certainty.
Heimdal’s Zero Trust component saves a significant amount of time for system administrators and, most importantly, it ensures limited access, increased compliance, simplification of addressing risks, helping customers to always be one step ahead of any cybercriminal – or insider threat.
Ramping up ransomware prevention
In a cyber threatscape where the competition between hackers (who will need a synchronized delivery of the attack – the so-called time-bomb ransomware – ) and cybersecurity experts (who will keep reducing detection time) is unprecedentedly escalating, ransomware prevention is crucial and will continue to be so.
The Ransomware Encryption Protection module, the newest addition to Heimdal’s portfolio, leverages AI on the disc structure, instead of signatures, MD5 or behavior – and, through that new type of AI, it safeguards devices from ransomware-related encryption attempts while enhancing the functionality of classic antivirus software.
In fact, it can be used in addition to any antivirus currently available, and it can ensure defense against any ransomware strain—whether it has already been identified or not.
Reinforcing customer engagement
All of our business decisions are based on what is best for our customers. Our most recent level of certification ensures that their data is kept as secure as possible with us. The SOC 2 Type II / ISAE 3000 certification offers trustworthy visibility and transparency into the extent of our operational and compliance-related processes.
We also recently earned the G2 Users Love Us badge for consistently receiving positive customer feedback, and we plan to keep doing so. We’ll keep putting ourselves in the shoes of our clients and thinking about what we would ultimately require or want from a cybersecurity vendor.
Final Thoughts
As studies show, the biggest concern for businesses worldwide in 2022 is related to cyber risks. They will only get more and more dangerous in the years to come, whether we talk about deepfakes, outsourcing-related threats, ransomware attacks and payments regulations or cyberattacks resulting in human casualties.
It’s absolutely mandatory for C-level executives of companies of all sizes to include cybersecurity on their top priority list and implement an effective incident and response plan that can help them boost their cybersecurity posture.
Morten Kjaersgaard is the visionary CEO of Denmark-based Heimdal®, an AI-powered cybersecurity leader with a global reach, safeguarding 15,000 businesses from 260+ million cyberattacks. With a Corporate Marketing background, Morten bridges cybersecurity intricacies with business goals. He's a cybersecurity advocate, event speaker, and insightful blog contributor. Morten uniquely translates technicalities into actionable insights, a valuable asset in the digital landscape. His presentations blend cybersecurity expertise, real-world business engagement, and data-driven insights, inspiring innovative strategies. Morten doesn't settle for the status quo, pushing organizations to embrace bold, revolutionary approaches. Connect with him on LinkedIn for more.
