Happy new year 2021
Dec 31st, 2020 by Jesper Kråkhede
It is New Year´s Eve again. A quieter one this year. Fewer guests, a bit of champagne and, as usual, the security architect writing a blog post.
What a year. A year ago I wrote about a strange pneumonia in China and hoped it would stay there. It didn´t. A month later I was thinking about working from home for my own health, and by March most of us had no choice. Offices emptied, the VPN became the front door and the attackers noticed it faster than most IT departments.
Looking back at the security year, three things stand out for me. Remote access became the most attacked part of the company, through VPN vulnerabilities, brute force on remote desktop and stolen passwords that kept working after the patch. Ransomware kept growing, and the attackers got even better at timing their attacks and at switching off our defences. And just a few weeks ago we learned that a widely used network management product had been used to sneak into thousands of organisations through a poisoned software update. A reminder that trust in the supply chain is also something we need to verify.
On the positive side, I have never had so many good discussions about Zero Trust. The crisis forced many companies to do in weeks what they had planned for years.
The vaccines are rolling out. Let´s hope 2021 brings us back to the office, at least now and then.
Stay safe, patch your servers and Happy new year!!!