The war in Ukraine has unleashed a tsunami of state-sponsored cyber warfare activity with close coordination of cyber and military campaigns. We have also seen a quantum change of gear from threat actors in attacking entire countries, as was the case in Costa Rica and Peru. Against this backdrop, increasingly, we are seeing cyber activity having a disruptive physical impact in the real-world such as attacks on critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, ransomware has graduated into a sophisticated multi-billion-dollar global industry.
While war and nation state attacks dominate the headlines, ransomware with its potential for enormous financial reward, is now the number one security threat to enterprises. The challenge is made more serious by an increasing reliance on public and private cloud infrastructure and applications. Organizations need to take an integrated, prevent-first, approach to protecting their whole IT estate and not be dependent on the security assurances of public cloud providers. Regardless of whether your company’s infrastructure is cloud-based, on-premise or both, the threat from state-sponsored cybercrime is now so serious, it is no exaggeration to say that it is time for enterprises to put their entire security teams on a war footing.