Organisations will adopt AI and other emerging technologies to help fight this year’s growing cyber threats.
With 2017 seeing an enormous number of data breaches, businesses should be looking at their cybersecurity processes and planning how to effectively monitor their network security in the year to come. With massive developments in monitoring and AI providing unmissable cybersecurity opportunities, here are five predictions of what we expect to see in 2018.
1. Organisations will increasingly adopt AI-based systems to help with Cybersecurity
In 2018, we’ll see companies using AI-based tools to benchmark their networks to ensure that companies know exactly what systems should ‘normally’ look like, allowing abnormalities to be identified faster before cyber incidents become full-blown attacks.
Despite hackers constantly evolving their attack methods to target new vulnerability points and bypass existing defence systems, AI-based tools can use real-time analytical models to search for anomalies. While analysts still need to decide whether these anomalies require urgent action or not, AI can help make them more productive.
We can also expect to see AI being used more to evaluate and prioritise security alerts. This will automate the more routine procedures that analysts have to undertake, and may even reduce threat related ‘false positives’ alerts in networks. Many companies are relying on rule-sets provided by third-party providers to deal with false positives, and they often don’t have the ability to tune and change the rules. This means that they either suffer the false positives and ignore them, or turn off that rule if the false positives are too prevalent – neither of which is an effective strategy.
AI-based systems can help by filtering out the noise of false positives, making it easier for analysts to identify, and focus on, the real threats.
2. Companies will handle breach communication much better than they did in 2017
PayPal is a great example of this. The company should be commended for implementing good hygiene practices that resulted in identifying and announcing the breach at TIO on 4th December, and for showing leadership in claiming responsibility for dealing with the outcome. We’re set to see a big difference between those companies that try and sweep breaches under the carpet, and those that are set up with the right processes to investigate breaches and respond appropriately. Those who attempt to hide breaches – we’re looking at you Uber – will be treated with contempt by customers and the media, as indicated by surveys that indicate as many as 85% of respondents wouldn’t do business with firms that had suffered a data breach.
Of course, on 25th May, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect, which means companies will have to notify the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of a breach within 72 hours, or a fine of up to 4% of global revenue.
Sensible organisations will look to implement stronger protection using application whitelisting, encryption and other techniques and improve their detection capability. They should also look to collect and store more definitive evidence about what takes place on their networks – in the form of more verbose log data, NetFlow history and full packet capture. Without this, organisations will find it impossible to investigate a breach quickly enough to satisfy regulatory obligations.
3. Retailers will be far more risk averse during holidays
Companies have begun to accept that optimised monitoring needs to take place all year-round, and Christmas will be no exception. However, companies will become more risk adverse, and whether it’s a bank or a retailer, as the holiday period approaches, often there’s a “blackout” period during which network and security teams are not allowed to make updates and changes to their networks other than urgent patches.
Threat actors may step their activity during the holiday period because there is a higher chance of evading identification and more to gain. This year, Shopify revealed that at the peak of Black Friday, online shoppers were making 2,800 orders per minute, worth approximately US$1million. Had Shopify experienced an outage of just five minutes during this busy period, it would have cost them US$5million in revenue. Protecting against outages – such as might result from a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack – is critical at these times. Additionally, this volume of online activity makes it easy for hackers to hide their movements while everyone’s focus is on making sure systems stay up and handle the load.
4. New housekeeping and the end of BYOD
Basic house-keeping will play a big role in cybersecurity in 2018. We’ll see a lot more staff training, and more focus on patching and standardisation so that companies avoid attacks like the widespread ransomware outbreaks we saw this year.
We’re also likely to see more companies moving away from BYOD. The reality is that BYOD has simply proven too hard to regulate and the risk it poses too difficult to protect against. In sensitive networks, with a lot at stake, this risk is not acceptable any longer.
5. Increasing use of strong encryption, and attacks over encrypted connections.
We already know that encryption of network traffic is being used more frequently by attackers as way to hide evidence of their activity. Analysts and their detection tools can’t see into the payload of encrypted traffic.
Unless, of course, they have the encryption keys. If operators force all SSL connections to pass through a proxy, they can decrypt the traffic and see inside the payload. This allows the proxy to provide a clear-text version of the traffic to security tools for analysis, or to full packet capture appliances like the EndaceProbe Network Recorder.
Conclusion
So, will 2018 be just as unpredictable when it comes to cybersecurity, data breaches and network infiltration? Chances are, most likely it will. However, with the right plans, practices and network monitoring in place, companies can at least prepare themselves for the worst, and prevent any possible breaches from being anywhere near as extensive as those that took place in 2017.
Source: https://www.itproportal.com/features/new-year-new-defence-cybersecurity-help-and-predictions-for-2018/
Article Link: https://ddosattacks.net/new-year-new-defence-cybersecurity-help-and-predictions-for-2018/