In this week’s DevOps news, VMware Carbon Black issues its semiannual Global Incident Response Threat Report. In it, the firm warns readers that COVID-19 has brought a surge in cyberattacks that security teams are struggling to keep up with — 53% of survey respondents reported increases in cyberattacks related to COVID-19. Top endpoint security issues to be addressed include remote access inefficiencies, VPN vulnerabilities, and staff shortages. Looking forward, cloud jacking was identified by 42% of respondents as “very likely” to become more common in the next 12 months.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes an important business cycle called the doom loop, a negative cycle created by reaction without understanding. In a recent Knowledge Project podcast, he shared this about companies in the doom loop, “Here’s what’s really scary. You are going through the first three of five phases where looking in from the outside you still look healthy, but you are already sick… And you are not visibly sick where nobody can deny it anymore until stage four out of five stages. And the fifth stage is a stage you never come back from which is capitulation to irrelevance or death.” The doom loop illustrates the importance of the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop as a model for responding to shifting market situations with intelligent agility.

According to new research by VMware Carbon Black, attacks continue to accelerate. In this first USA threat report, researchers learn 92% of security professionals said the volume of attacks they faced has increased. And, 97% of organizations had suffered a breach in the prior 12 months; 84% report that attacks have become increasingly sophisticated.