Cyber Security: The Future Trends

Simpler were the times when the most valuable thing you can lose was gold and diamonds. Humanity has enriched technology so much now; that the last thing you want to lose is your personal information. Hackers are plotting attacks on integrity of corporate data which is the most important asset of any business. From the Zomato leaks this year to the very recent HBO GoT leaks, attackers are always out there planting unbelievable numbers of bots all over the web. In the last year, 59 million attacks were made on 10,000 organizations. When some were detected soon enough to avoid potential damage, others did cause huge inconvenience to the commercial growth and integrity of the organizations.

As attackers’ gets innovative and move far ahead security systems in place, what are the type of attacks and prevention methods that we should look out for?

The Internet of Things and the risk of Identity theft.

With our obsession to connect everything to the internet, we have brought on ourselves the biggest threat of being controlled by someone else who can hack into the devices we practically use. The spectrum of IoT devices are increasing day by day that our fitness trackers and home automation systems can contain behavioural and emotional information about ourselves. The security on these devices is very loose and any skilled hacker can let themselves in to the network through the security holes. Using public wifi hotspots to connect to your personal gadgets is literally like giving attackers key to your life.

Forget about personal gadgets; think about a scenario when a hacker has access to our centralized traffic signals and federal information or Industrial IoT’s like nuclear power plants and power grids! The importance of corporate training programs or IT certification training  to educate employees who works with critical industrial machineries, is huge now. Security systems should be capable enough to recognize these kind of threats and stay updated about the latest trends. The scariest thing about this is that we don’t have skilled professionals to execute such intricate work.

Cloud Security in a wider perspective.

Cloud systems are targeted by hackers a lot due to the latest growth in adoption of cloud in all major areas. DDoS(Distributed Denial of Services) attacks, is a form of attack which declines services by consuming all the bandwidth the cloud resources has. This is made by placing continuous requests to these systems hence increasing the traffic to these resources and making it unavailable for consumers. Intrusion Detection Systems are provided by many organizations to make clouds more secure.

Another side of this issue is that, the enterprises that uses cloud services often think that the cloud service provider has the sole responsibility of protecting it from getting attacked.  They often forget the fact that they should be doing additional security measures on top of the ones cloud providers offer.

Cloud systems like Microsoft Azure, IBM cloud and Google has incorporated AI into their security systems to analyze cyber attack patterns and effectively control hacks on a large number. Integration of cognitive intelligence on machines to make them capable of foreseeing or eliminating potential threats automatically is indeed a great way of dealing with this situation.

DevOps to the rescue!

DevOps has become a very common and intelligent option nowadays for building business. Having the Development and Operations team working hand in hand by understanding the high/low level business requirement has proven records of success. DevOps can be of great help to aid in cyber security too. By reducing human intervention, redundant execution and by clearly defining processes, DevOps gives corporate hope on streamlining their security policies. Applying security right from the beginning of the development cycle by finding loopholes in the code sent for reviews to security professionals can greatly help in avoiding risk in later stages of deployment. This new DevOps trend has already gained its popularity by the name SecDevOps. SecDevOps ensures a micro level security maintenance action in organizations this way.

Prevention or Detection and Response?

Gartner reports show that Detection and Response has taken over the traditional prevention-oriented process for cyber security. With a rise of 7.6% investment on IT Security by companies in 2017, Companies are keen to invest on enhancing security by detection and response. Organizations have finally understood that prevention methodologies are less effective unless they are coupled with detection and elimination strategies.

Also, it is hard to catch up with the very innovative and  competitive pace that hackers are advancing through our systems. A more intelligent option would be to find threats and act fast to seal the holes in security as soon as possible. Exposure scanning, disaster recovery services, anti-virus, encryption, and malware detection is makes these processes further foolproof. To pick up the knowledge related to these skills various IT boot camps and boot camp certification classes can be availed, which can set you on the way to becoming a cyber security professional.

The stories of people who discovered the dark web has very chilling stories about the things they saw there. This place is often where it all starts to rot. There are Ransomwares that exploits human behavioural patterns for spreading the infections furthermore. They offer pyramid style discounts to victims by offering to give a free release from the infection if they are willing to spread it to two more users. As the attackers get so innovative and smart this way, the industry is in constant panic as it lacks highly skilled solution architects for cyber catastrophes. The scarcity of cyber security professionals in the job market is indeed a risk for the growing data in the organization’s servers and clouds.

Cyber criminals are a step away from triggering world wars and nuclear holocausts with the abilities they posses to use information they have in their vicinity.

It will be tough but we don’t have an option but to win this fight by staying alert and informed about these trends. Let’s be safe out there!