Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 01 | Page 50

FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY ANSECURITY David Peters, Technical Director, ANSecurity D avid Peters, Technical Director at ANSecurity, provides us with an insight into data breaching, protection and security for businesses. Criminal services expand As predictable as day follows night, 2018 will see more high-profile breaches impact large and well-known companies. What will be less visible to the public will be the activities of Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS) which will expand, allowing more focused criminals to rent resource for ransomware campaigns that may never be exposed to the light of public scrutiny. Repeats of a ‘ransom-worm’ using a true zero-day vulnerability is a major concern over the coming year. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// THE TOP TREND FOR THE COMING YEAR IS THE ADOPTION OF BLOCKCHAIN – THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND BITCOIN – AND ITS IMMENSE POTENTIAL TO DISRUPT AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD OF MONEY, BUSINESS, AND SOCIETY USING A VARIETY OF APPLICATIONS. next 12 to 18 months will likely see a major IoT vulnerability within a commonly used shared library that will have a major impact and will make international news. may well motivate organisations that have previously put their heads in the sand. GDPR may raise broader InfoSec awareness There seems a growing public awareness about security, especially within the consumer electronic market that is being remade by the growth of IoT. A major incident in 2018 that impacts a large number of users where the culprit is a major vendor and the result is a class action lawsuit, might well be the catalyst for vendors to start building better security within products from day one, instead of the ‘launch fast and patch later’ situation we have today. n The approach of the GDPR deadline will hopefully raise awareness of the need for good practice around security that spreads from beyond IT to other areas of the organisation. Laziness around password security and lack of two-factor authentication are still issues that are hard to overcome but the big stick of GDPR fines Law suits prompt better security Advertising and CDN misuse will rise The rise of CaaS will also lead to increasing sophisticated ransomware and phishing campaigns as well as the misuse of advertising and other Content Delivery Networks for drive- by exploitation as well as more well-crafted and convincing email campaigns. IoT is a soft spot Over the last few years, the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has been a major trend which will only accelerate during 2018, leading to a bigger surface area to launch DDoS attacks and as a conduit for injecting malware. The 50 INTELLIGENTCIO In 2018, some interesting applications of Blockchain and IoT in the area of cybersecurity will emerge www.intelligentcio.com