Trend Micro’s 2020 Predictions – Escalating Cloud and Supply Chain Risk

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today announced its 2020 predictions report, which states that organizations will face a growing risk from their cloud and the supply chain. The growing popularity of cloud and DevOps environments will continue to drive business agility while exposing organizations, from enterprises to manufacturers, to third-party risk.

“As we enter a new decade, organizations of all industries and sizes will increasingly rely on third party software, open-source, and modern working practices to drive the digital innovation and growth they crave,” said Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro. “Our threat experts predict that this fast growth and change will bring new risks of supply chain attacks. From the cloud layer all the way down to the home network, IT security leaders will need to reassess their cyber risk and protection strategy in 2020.”

Attackers will increasingly go after corporate data stored in the cloud via code injection attacks such as deserialization bugs, cross-site scripting and SQL injection. They will either target cloud providers directly or compromise third-party libraries to do this.

In fact, the increasing use of third-party code by organizations employing a DevOps culture will increase business risk in 2020 and beyond. Compromised container components and libraries used in serverless and microservices architectures will further broaden the enterprise attack surface, as traditional security practices struggle to keep up.

Managed service providers (MSPs) will be targeted in 2020 as an avenue for compromising multiple organizations via a single target. They will not only be looking to steal valuable corporate and customer data, but also install malware to sabotage smart factories and extort money via ransomware.

The new year will also see a relatively new kind of supply chain risk, as remote workers introduce threats to the corporate network via weak Wi-Fi security. Additionally, vulnerabilities in connected home devices can serve as a point of entry into the corporate network.

Amidst this ever-volatile threat landscape, Trend Micro recommends organizations:

Improve due diligence of cloud providers and MSPs
Conduct regular vulnerability and risk assessments on third parties
Invest in security tools to scan for vulnerabilities and malware in third-party components
Consider Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools to help minimize the risk of misconfigurations
Revisit security policies regarding home and remote workers