Guest Commentary By Terry L. Allen, CISSP, OXEN Technology
The State of Cybersecurity in 2022
Maybe it’s the times we find ourselves in, the experience that comes from getting older or both — but the challenges we face feel overwhelming. For Gen-X (those born approximately 1965 to 1980), the generations of our parents and grandparents saw many of our present challenges in the 20th century with wars, pandemics, geopolitical tension, economic hardships and likely supply and workforce pressures to go with it. 2022 might be a different calendar of time, but we have been here before in history and lived to talk about it with one relatively new exception: cybersecurity.
As I look back over the past year, 2021 was a defining one for cybersecurity. Some of the year’s most impactful incidents, as shared on
darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/6-of-the-most- impactful-cybersecurity-incidents-of-2021, follow.
• a severe vulnerability in Log4J logging framework present in untold numbers of devices worldwide
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mobankers.com
• ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline resulted in gas shortages on the U.S. East Coast
• an attack on Kaseya, an IT management platform used by IT service providers, that affected thousands of downstream client networks with ransomware
• on premises Microsoſt Exchange Server (ProxyLogon) vulnerability that was so bad, the FBI was ordered to take the unprecedented step to intervene uninvitedly on private mail servers to mitigate the damage
• “PrintNightmare” vulnerability in the essential document printing subsystem of every single Microsoſt desktop and server
• an attack on a Florida Water Utility that resulted in the near poisoning of the water supply system
Ideally, soſtware defects are found and reported proactively and fixed privately, before being disclosed publicly. In many of the cases mentioned, everyone was finding out that the fox was already in the henhouse! Zero-day attacks occur when defects in a particular soſtware system are found to be actively used by malicious actors to attack computer systems before IT teams
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