A look back at the OPM breach, and how it compares to the SolarWinds incident.

We don’t want to bury the lede. By consensus, in 2021 expect more pandemic stress, expect remote work to become so deeply ingrained that it will be hard for many to imagine returning to their old workplace, and expect the Bears to snuffle here, there, and everywhere.

A final look through the dark glass into 2021.

Cybereason has more detailed thoughts on 2021, which in their view will look a lot like 2020, only moreso.

The wave of nation-state cyber operations, mostly Russian, that will carry us into 2021 has so far been spying, and not data corruption or kinetic destruction, but that could change in the near future. Radiflow has some thoughts on how industrial processes might come into the operators’ cross-hairs.

What investors will look for in the cyber sector.

When investors look at the coming year, what trends are they alert for in cybersecurity? We asked Yoav Leitersdorf of YL Ventures what he thought the coming year would bring, and how that would affect what investors would be looking for. In large part he sees investors looking to the most pressing needs enterprises will face:

“We see hackers exploiting new WFH vulnerabilities with attacks focused on supply chains, hospitals, insider data exfiltration, cloud apps and code. Investors will continue to look for technologies that address these specific markets or close remaining gaps in cybersecurity, like XDR which brings AI to threat detection and response and works across endpoints, networks and cloud. But what is emerging now is to use security as a business enabler by moving it downstream to the code with devops-ready tools for developers to build in security for authorization, data protection and access. Also looking outward, SaaS app security is more important than ever and still presents interesting opportunities, as well as cybersecurity management platforms to help address the operational complexity of cybersecurity programs.

“Enterprises across the board are allocating significant resources towards software development. This widening attack surface is driving demand for solutions that can help security ‘shift left,’ implementing security measures directly into the software development lifecycle. Application security is increasingly being owned by developers, leading to the need for security solutions tailored for these internal users.”

Thus customer demand will tend to flag investor interest.

The massive and successful penetration of US Government networks by Russia’s SVR has already had an effect on investment in the sector. Bloomberg notes that the incident has extended a moderate bull run in cybersecurity stocks, with analysts seeing an increase in security spending that augurs “a powerful and long-term demand tailwind for the sector.”

Not predictions, just wishes.

So what do we wish for, as we arrive at the last issue of our ninth year of publication? To all people of good will, we wish that all will be well, and that all manner of things will be well.

But since good will isn’t…