Top Cyber Security Trends of 2018: New Threats on the Horizon

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Enterprise cloud security is a 24/7 job, which means IT teams must always pay attention to every aspect of a company’s private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure. And as challenging as it is today, there will always be new cybersecurity concerns in the future.

Future Cyber Security Trends and Threats in 2018

For 2018, those challenges are expected to grow, as more complex threats continue to surface, and cybercriminals find and develop new ways of attacking secure IT systems both in and out of the cloud.

With that in mind, 5nine and I have gathered together some cloud security threat predictions for 2018 to help IT professionals keep tabs on some of the new threats they may face in the upcoming year.

1) Control what matters, since you can’t protect everything equally. That’s the advice of Earl Perkins, a research vice president at Gartner, who raised the issue at a Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit earlier this year. “Take the money you’re spending on prevention and begin to drive it more equitably to detection and response,” Perkins said. “The truth is, that you won’t be able to stop every threat and you need to get over it.

”That means adapting your security systems to focus on detection, response and remediation, which is how the cybersecurity fight is changing today, according to Perkins. “In the future, it will most likely move to prediction of what’s coming before anything happens.

2) Cybersecurity in the cloud will take on new approaches in the future, as security experts begin looking at deciding who they can trust and who they can’t trust in the cloud. This will come through the development of new security guidelines for private and public cloud use that will use a cloud decision model to assess and work to resolve cloud risks, according to Gartner.

3) To further harden cloud security, DevOps should become DevSecOps, with a focus on security as companies work more directly to bring together software development and overall operations, according to Gartner. By not running these departments separately, security can be tightened as the code is written, rather than trying to do it later when applications are already in the cloud.

4) The internet of things (IoT) will continue to bring new and expanded challenges to the cloud, including a myriad of unmanaged risks that users, manufacturers, and companies have not fully anticipated, according to the Information Security Forum. The ISF, a London-based authority on cyber, information security and risk management, recently released a list of its own 2018 cybersecurity threat predictions.

“Organizations will adopt IoT devices with enthusiasm, not realizing that these devices are often insecure by design and therefore offer many opportunities for attackers,” Steve Durbin, managing director of the ISM, said in a statement. “In addition, there will be an increasing lack of transparency in the rapidly-evolving IoT ecosystem, with vague terms and conditions that allow organizations to use personal data in ways customers did not intend. It will be problematic for organizations to know what information is leaving their networks or what data is being secretly captured and transmitted by devices such as smartphones and smart TVs.

”For enterprises involved in IoT markets, this could have impacts with their cloud infrastructures, which will need to be protected from related vulnerabilities.

“When breaches occur, or transparency violations are revealed, organizations will be held liable by regulators and customers for inadequate data protection,” said Durbin. “In a worst-case scenario, when IoT devices are embedded in industrial control systems, security compromises could result in harm to individuals or even loss of life.”

5) Also on the ISF’s cyber threat list for 2018 are concerned about Crime-as-a-Service, as criminal organizations around the world continue their ongoing development and become increasingly more sophisticated, according to Durbin. “The complex hierarchies, partnerships, and collaborations that mimic large private sector organizations will facilitate their diversification into new markets and the commoditization of their activities at a global level,” including in targets in the cloud.

“Organizations will struggle to keep pace with this increased sophistication and the impact will extend worldwide, with cryptoware becoming the leading malware of choice for its threat and impact value,” said Durbin. “The resulting cyber incidents in the coming year will be more persistent and damaging than organizations have experienced previously, leading to business disruption and loss of trust in existing security controls.”

The growing number of information security threats are “jeopardizing the veracity and reputation of today’s most reliable organizations,” he said. “In 2018, we will see increased sophistication in the threat landscape with threats being personalized to their target’s weak spots or metamorphosing to take account of defenses that have already been put in place.”

As 2018 approaches, the fight to defend your company’s private, public and hybrid cloud resources will become more important than ever before. Hackers don’t care about the people they affect or the chaos they create. It’s up to companies to protect their users from these cyber threats – and the minimum requirements just won’t cut it anymore.

When you are mapping out your 2018 Cyber Security plan of action, make sure you include all of these in your arsenal of cyber weapons:

  • A Strong Firewall for your specific environment that has multitenancy support.
  • An Intrusion Detection System that is able to identify packet anomalies, as well as both external and internal threats.
  • An Advanced Anomaly Analysis solution that uses AI algorithms. This is crucial to detecting abnormal behavior or deviations. It is also useful because it can help you create a historical baseline. This allows you to catch threats faster and destroy them before they have enough time to do the same to you.
  • An Antivirus system that is both lean and mean. Make sure you always have the most up-to-date rules. Agentless antivirus solutions are best because you won’t have to compromise performance for protection. You’ll never even know it’s there, but those trojans and viruses that try to penetrate your system will!

No matter what Cyber Security Solution you decide to go with, when it comes to securing your environment, leave no cyber leaf unturned. Always make sure your security software can cover every aspect of your company’s setup, whether that may be on-premises, cloud or hybrid. It’s time to take a byte out of cybercrime!

Until next time, Rob…..