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Will Cyber Crime Rise In 2021 & How A Business Can Remain Safe

2020 was a difficult year for everyone. Health to Wealth, Personal to Business, everything was hit badly. COVID-19 pandemic time was also a crucial contributing factor for increasing cybercrime. You must be wondering how? As many people are doing their work online due to work from home and many of them are even using their assets for work, this has become a golden opportunity for hackers to hack and steal the data from these vulnerable assets, or those websites /applications being used, which don’t have strong security services.

Many organizations suffered breaches as they struggled to find the right solutions for staying connected while protecting valuable and sensitive information in this era of remote work. Even after these many months, the chances of returning to office driven operations anytime soon looks unlikely.

The year 2021 will not be much different & for cybersecurity, the trend indicates that it’ll go worse. The cybercrime is set to rise in the coming year too. Below are 10 predictions that we as security professionals have for 2021:

  1. With transition of office environment to work-from-home / work-from-anywhere environment, malicious actors will continue to give their attention to these easier target.
  2. Phishing and Ransomware which saw rise in 2020 and will continue to rise in 2021 in form of malicious campaigns related to Covid / Vaccine etc..
  3. Covid enforced accelerated digital transformation efforts & the adoption of cloud, new technologies has increased the risk of data exposure, which will be exploited by the bad forces.
  4. As we saw in 2020, the rise in healthcare breaches, 2021 appears to show the trend of cyber adversaries targeting intellectual property such as vaccine research etc.
  5. More sensitive information leakages in Edutech & fintech industries are expected to happen in 2021.
  6. Ransomware attacks are expected to be more aggressive and will target the most critical industries, including healthcare and manufacturing industries, and continue to leak hacked data on the dark web.
  7. Work-from-anywhere environment will increase the number of data breaches caused by insiders. When organizations have reduced control on their workforce, it’s easy for an insider to make mistakes, resulting in unintentional data breaches.
  8. Attacks against 3rd party suppliers will increase, as hackers look for smaller, softer targets, which are easy to breach then lead the way to penetrate Big Fish.
  9. With more work on 5G, 5G vulnerabilities are expected to become headlines & will be exploited by attackers.
  10. Exposed APIs will be the next favored attack vector for enterprise breaches.


As the blend of remote work / WFH scenario & insecure data practices persist, cyber breach costs are slated to rise across all industries. Global cybercrime costs is expected to grow by 15% per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. The exponential increase in cybercrime, including breaches, contributes to a projected 12% CAGR in cybersecurity IT spending by 2021.

Your mind must have one question, and that might be what you can do to make your origination secure? Now let’s see what organizations can do to keep them safe in this 2021:

  • After this drastic change, organizations will need to assess themselves again with a risk-based focus, rebuild their risk register and perform more threat modelling exercises to identify the organization’s overall true risk posture.
  • To manage the things within reduced budgets, organizations will need to converge across security solutions.
  • Zero-trust strategy, and SASE adoption will be of key interest. Zero Trust capabilities will be more important than ever in the current distributed & heterogeneous environment, which is hard to manage & controlled.
  • Governance & Operational transformation through automation, adopting SecDevOps methodologies, and using a balanced Risk-Based Vulnerability Management will prove to be very fruitful.
  • Companies will realize that not just the right technology, they need the right business processes too to protect against cyber-crime. There has to be a proper mix of People, Process & Technology.
  • Organizations will need to invest and commit to build a strong security culture. Equipped with required awareness & training, every individual must be trained to be a strong first line of defence.
  • It’s high time to improve the Incident Response process and conduct more IR Workshops and Tabletop exercises to be ready to face the worst.

To hire top cybersecurity consulting companies is becoming the need of the hour. There are various direct & indirect impacts which your business will face if you became the victim of a cyber attack. Most organizations are not equipped with the desired skill set in house & need external help.

If you don’t have in-house skillset to design & implement comprehensive cybersecurity for your environment, a small search in google for top VCISO in Delhi NCR or for top cybersecurity consultants in Delhi NCR or for top cybersecurity companies in Delhi NCR or for your region will list a few cyber security experts around you who can help you with your cybersecurity requirements. We (Cybersec Knights) are also one of them. If you need any help, then feel free to contact us.