Countless organizations suffered a data breach in 2018, including British Airways, T-Mobile, Saks/Lord Taylor, and Marriott – with the Marriott data breach coming in as the second largest in history, after the two record-setting Yahoo hacks. With so many large data breaches in 2018, what does 2019 have in store? Today we look at some of the top cyber security predictions for 2019.
There will be more nation-state attacks and surveillance of individuals
Journalists, dissidents, and politicians will continue to be targets of state-conducted or sponsored cyberattacks, and countries must be cognizant that these attacks could be politically motivated. The worst possible result will be a nation conducting surveillance on its own citizens.
Passwords will continue to be replaced by biometrics
Biometrics will continue to rise to the forefront as passwords remain vulnerable. Facial recognition is now becoming mainstream largely because of the iPhone X’s Face, which uses infrared and visible light scans to uniquely identify a face. The technology actually recognizes changes in a face, or if a user alters their appearance, such as growing a mustache or wearing a hat.
Larger companies will acquire smaller cyber security focused firms
To create broader cyber security product family offerings, the bigger players will start acquiring startup technologies into their portfolios. In the last year, AT&T purchased AlienVault, Spunk acquired Phantom Cyber, and BlackBerry purchased cyber security firm Cylance.
Malware will continue to become more sophisticated
Due to the growing sophistication in malware, traditional antivirus solution will not provide sufficient protection. Organizations will need to use solutions that have a direct malware focus, alongside tracking of network activity (in and out of the network). Some of the key malware challenges will be ransomware, crypto mining, banking Trojans, and VPN filters.
Securing data in the cloud will continue to pose a challenge
With more organizations using cloud services and solutions, securing data in the cloud will become more difficult. Organizations will need to consider machine learning technologies, as well as hiring SecDevOps teams when developing in-house software in the cloud.
Defenders need better automation
More sophisticated artificial intelligence features in security tools will be seen in 2019 due to networks and threats becoming more complex. It takes malware authors just minutes to find a vulnerability and develop an exploit. Automated patching tools are critical to deploying fixes across the large digital infrastructures that run many modern businesses.
The first big software bot related data breech will occur
Bots have been used by organizations for numerous things including booking employee travel and chatting with customers. In the coming years, experts agree that we will see bots extracting data from CRM systems such as SAP and Salesforce. Most bots are left unprotected, which provides an open door for cyber thieves to hack into a bot and also gain access to critical systems and data. Since bots are left unmonitored, there is no telling how long an attack like this could go on for before it is detected.
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