At last year’s Best of Breed conference sponsored by The Channel Company, Optiv chief executive Kevin Lynch boldly outlined 10 predictions and trends he saw unfolding in 2022.

“We were pretty darn accurate,” Lynch boasted at this past week’s BoB 2022 conference in Atlanta, referring to his “bets” last year.

So the leader of the top pure-play security solutions provider in the U.S. is back this year with more predictions – five of them to be exact – after consulting his colleagues at Denver-based Optiv, which employs 2,400 workers and has about 6,000 customers.

Lynch certainly had a lot of materials and issues to work with as he drew up this year’s predictions list, from recent high-profile ransomware attacks to labor-shortage concerns to increased fears of operational technology (OT) attacks.

Some problems haven’t changed much over the past year – and probably won’t change much in 2023, Lynch said. But the industry is also always changing and evolving, throwing up new challenges for security experts to tackle, he said.

“There are vicious games being played,” Lynch said of threat actors roaming across the digital world in general.

The following are Lynch’s five security-industry predictions for 2023.