Is it possible to anticipate what the coming year will bring us – pro and con – on the cybersecurity front? Making precise predictions about one of the most dynamic sectors in technology would be a fool’s errand, but some current trends are almost certain to continue, and likely accelerate.
First, the bad news. It’s not a secret that cyberthreats have multiplied, nor that successful attacks have grown in both volume and impact. The new AT&T Cybersecurity Insights report cites troubling data from a global survey AT&T sponsored. Among its findings: Nearly 80 percent of the surveyed organizations had been negatively affected by a cybersecurity attack in the prior 12 months.
Beneath that top-line number was the growing prominence of new forms of attack. Most notable among them were ransomware attacks and super-charged distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults, the latter of which marshalled hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to create huge attack bots.
When asked about the biggest cybersecurity threats they anticipated in the coming year, 46 percent of the AT&T survey respondents cited ransomware. That percentage lagged only the longstanding threats from malware, worms and viruses (cited by 60 percent) and unauthorized access to corporate data (cited by 49 percent). Nearly one-third (32 percent) put IoT-based attacks on their list of top future concerns.
Unfortunately, ransomware attacks will almost certainly become more pervasive and varied during 2018. Some attacks will adhere to the brute-force model of infect, lock and extort, while others will be more sophisticated. In some cases, ransomware assaults will serve primarily as a diversionary tactic to draw security resources and attention away from other avenues of attack.
For their part, IoT-based DDoS attacks are likely to grow in both bot size and traffic volumes as they continue to utilize poorly secured IoT devices. There will be millions of such vulnerable devices installed for years to come, with many device manufacturers only now starting to offer hardened versions of their products. Beyond specific threat types, we can expect to see attackers increasingly utilize the same technologies defenders are using for threat detection and response. For example, sophisticated attackers are already using big data analytics to scrutinize traffic patterns and search for opportunities and vulnerabilities that might not be evident without such broad and deep analysis.
The post What’s Next for Cybersecurity in 2018? appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/whats-next-for-cybersecurity-in-2018/
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