It’s the time of the year where we should look ahead and be prepared for the threat landscape modifications in the world of cybersecurity in 2019.
As we saw, 2018 proved to be another dramatic year with the devastating news on data breaches across every industry segment, cyber espionage exercises, nation-state-backed cyberattacks, cryptojacking, and many other cybersecurity incidents all over the world.
In 2019, we predict, the cybersecurity landscape will be more diverse and problematic for the individuals, governments, and businesses that are running globally.
Based on the incidents we saw around the globe, here are the top 7 cybersecurity predictions for 2019
1. GDPR Fines
The European Union (EU) had introduced GDPR initiative back on May 25th. But, in the past six months, most Data Protection Authorities have ignored the GDPR rule adjustments made by companies world wide – letting the compliance loose.
To make it on the run, the authorities have already started to fine companies that are failing to comply with GDPR guidelines or suffered data breaches.
Recently, the very first GDPR sanction in Germany fined an amount of EUR 20,000 to a flirty chat platform Knuddels.de where the attackers leaked about 808,000 email addresses and over 1.8 million usernames and passwords.
Another recent case with the Marriott’s breach. It is in the investigation, wherein the data of 500 million guests was compromised. According to an estimation; it could face a fine of up to EUR 20 million.
Hence, there is no surprise we will likely to see more strictness by the Data Protection authorities on companies in 2019, as per the GDPR fines are concerned.
2. Nation-State attacks and Surveillance on Individuals
To maintain the cultural or social norms, accountability for violations and to guard fundamental rights – the state-sponsored targeted cyberattacks on journalists, dissidents and politicians will continue to grow.
According to a report, Russia and China as two entities are moving swiftly to solidify their cyber sovereignty. Both are abolishing anonymity and gaining stronger control over the content presented to their citizens.
A recent example – Israeli newspaper The Haaretz reported that the country used Israeli cyberweapons to spy on its citizens.
3. More Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
The fatal vectors of attack today usually be attributed to APTs. It refers to a category of high-risk threats that pertain network intrusions performed by bad actors who aggressively pursue and compromise target organizations.
The primary goal of APT is Data exfiltration, where the APT groups take advantage of weak API endpoints, shadow IT loopholes, backdoors, human errors or zero-day vulnerabilities to target companies and government organizations with their intentions to disruption.
In 2019, we’ll seemingly visualize more APT attacks via the cloud, because of rapid cloud adoption within organization’s communication channels.
4. Up-skilling the Workforce for the Cloud age
This has been in practice since very long, and companies still take skill development as a big challenge.
Designing and developing cloud-enabled applications requires a lot of technical considerations. Both designers and developers must go deep on the details of platform implementations using a secured technology.
Also, when it comes to choosing between the available technologies, the deep understanding will come into play even if a company has Security Architects to make these choices.
In 2019, the up-skilling of talent will be one of the business objectives for the companies with the expectations of agility in smaller teams and developers.
5. AI in Cybersecurity Defense
Cybersecurity has become an AI hot spot for companies. Looking at this year, many VC firms have invested hugely into machine learning startups because of the increasing threat landscape and complexity of targeted attacks on enterprises. For example: Uber, Deloitte and Equifax data breaches.
Incumbent cybersecurity companies are deploying AI in their products and services as the first line of defense to enhance their rapid response to any cyber threat and for automatic detection and mitigation to reduce manual intervention of the tech employees.
Most of the global organizations have already witnessed the benefits of using AI to achieve faster and more accurate detection of threats.
A recent example: Giant tech companies like Google are adding AI defenses to protect their cloud datacenters. (Source)
For investors looking for early signs that artificial intelligence will disrupt industries, cybersecurity is a top sector to watch in 2019.
6. Spam and Phishing beyond Email
No matter how much cybersecurity improves over the years, “human error” will always be the highest risk factor for any company.
In 2019, email spam and phishing will continue to be the attacker’s most common gateway to get access to company property and this seems not to change for the predicted future. However, users still need to be aware of other potential attack vectors, especially search engine hijacking.
Even though many people are aware of email phishing practices, many are less cautious when clicking on the search engine results.
Major search engines typically detect these phishing sites quickly, but some sites can slip through the cracks. It is best to load known websites directly in a new tab instead of searching in the search engine or look for suspicious search engine results when surfing in general.
7. IoT at Risk
The growth of IoT applications and IoT solutions has been magnificent globally throughout the years. While capabilities of IoT applications also created disproportionately more information and in-secured data points.
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the gravity of mounting numerous cyberattacks carried out by billions of infected IoT devices all over the world. And with the introduction of Mirai botnet and its multiple variants, we’ll likely see increasing activities of compromised IoT devices to target organizations with cyberattacks in 2019.
Organizations need to be prepared against such attacks which include DDoS, access to personal data and compromised control servers.
Tip: Predictions are tough. Since the holiday season is rapidly approaching, organizations should implement defense mechanisms to protect their network and application assets against sophisticated attacks which can seriously harm their brand reputation and revenue. Implementing native endpoint security with the rapid attack defense could save an organization from sinking.