December 2022 Blog
Observations from 2022 – A Year in the Life of a Cybersecurity Company
I trust all the readers of this blog have had an enjoyable and restful holiday season. We wish you all the very best success and good health in 2023!
As we look back on 2022 from a cybersecurity perspective, rather than taking a wide, global perspective on cybersecurity last year, we can best relate to our own yearly journey in terms of what we saw and experienced.
Firstly, from what we saw in our Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) world, the threats and attack surfaces have undeniably multiplied and increased. We saw many instances of trojans, worms and malware coming from both weaponized phishing emails and malicious internet links. We cannot overemphasize the importance of endpoint user cybersecurity awareness training and IT hygiene education here as a means of reducing the impact of these attacks.
Secondly, we saw a continuation of ‘Living-off-the-Land’ (LoL) attacks using malicious scripts and file-less attack methods. We saw many new Indicators of Compromise (IoC)s, attempts at lateral movement and privilege escalation that accompanied these file-less LoL attacks. Fortunately, with CYDEF Smart-Monitor, we were able to detect these IoCs and prevent damage being done.
Thirdly, we are undoubtably also seeing unfriendly state actors who have targeted the Philippines with advanced persistent threats aimed at economic and strategic infiltration and sabotage. Long dwell times, external command and control and personal data exfiltration are the hallmarks of these state actor attacks. We have observed many external communications to neighboring countries that present themselves as friendly, but who are anything but. This trend will increase, and we can expect these persistent threats to manifest themselves in attacks on infrastructure and institutions in the next years.
So, we have weathered a difficult year and survived. We strongly believe that 2023 will be a year of increasing challenges, but also of opportunities and we are eager to embrace these. We wish to offer a heartfelt thank you to all our faithful customers, and we wish you the very best for 2023.