6 Cybersecurity Challenges You Must Address For 2017
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Intel Security predictions provide cyber threat insights for 2017.
Medical devices are playing a growing role in IoT as more and more devices — including pacemakers, insulin pumps, and nerve stimulators — are becoming internet enabled. With the need for immediate access in the healthcare industry, cybercriminals see a lucrative target in these devices.
In its report 2017 Threat Predictions, McAfee Labs and Intel Security foresee new threats to the healthcare industry through connected devices. A rapidly expanding area, the threats to IoT have yet to be fully understood and October’s massive DDoS attack raised another red flag.
As part of the report, McAfee Labs predicts 14 security developments for 2017; identifies three legal hurdles, 10 vendor actions, and 11 cloud threats likely to occur in the next four years; makes 21 predictions regarding Internet of Things security threats, legal actions, and vendor responses in the next four years; and identifies six hard to solve challenges for the cybersecurity industry to overcome.
Reflecting the informed opinions of 31 Intel Security thought leaders, the report examines current trends in cybercrime and makes predictions about what the future may hold for organizations working to take advantage of new technologies to both advance their businesses and provide better security protection.
“To change the rules of the game between attackers and defenders, we need to neutralize our adversaries’ greatest advantages,” said Vincent Weafer, vice president of Intel Security’s McAfee Labs. “As a new defensive technique is developed, its effectiveness increases until attackers are compelled to develop countermeasures to evade it. To overcome the designs of our adversaries, we need to go beyond understanding the threat landscape to changing the defender-attacker dynamics in six key areas: information asymmetry, making attacks more expensive, improving visibility, better identifying exploitation of legitimacy, improving protection for decentralized data, and detecting and protecting in agentless environments.”
McAfee predicts ransomware will peak in the middle of 2017 but then begin to recede, while threat intelligence sharing will see major advancements over the coming year. When it comes to Cloud security and the Internet of Things, McAfee Labs provided predictions for the next two to four years, including threat, economic, policy, and regional trends likely to shape each area.
The Cloud predictions including topics from trust in the cloud, storage of intellectual property, antiquated authentication, east-west and north-south attack vectors, gaps in coverage between service layers, for-hire hackers in the cloud, denial of service for ransom attacks, IoT implications for cloud security models, laws and litigation versus innovation, movement of data across borders, biometrics as cloud enablers, cloud access security brokers (CASBs), protection of data at rest and in motion, machine learning, cyber insurance, and ongoing conflicts pitting speed, efficiency, and cost against control, visibility, and security in cloud offerings.
The IoT predictions focused on cybercrime economics, ransomware, hacktivism, nation-state attacks on criminal infrastructure, challenges for device makers, privacy threats and opportunities, encryption, behavioral monitoring, and cyber insurance and risk management.
The report also identified six critical industry challenges: to improve threat defense effectiveness by reducing information asymmetry between defenders and attackers; making attacks more expensive or less profitable; improving visibility into cyber events; better identifying exploitation of legitimacy; improving protection for decentralized data; and detecting and protecting in agentless environments.