Cloud security has grown into a major issue for enterprises, as only one company in six encrypts all data, according to a Bitdefender survey. While 85% of CISOs fear security flaws in the public cloud, as many as 51 percent of enterprises don’t properly secure their cloud storage services, according to RedLock, leaving their data exposed to hackers.
Businesses cannot come up with a mitigation strategy to efficiently detect, identify and manage insider threats, according to research from the Ponemon Institute, so they risk the loss of critical confidential data and resources, network shutdown and reputational damage. In the past year, 159 organizations from the United States, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region dealt with 3,269 security breaches caused by insider threats due to plain negligence.
In 2015, Russian hackers shut down Ukraine’s electrical grid after infecting the infrastructure with malware. It was only a matter of time until they would target the US power system. As of 2016, US critical operational infrastructures have been under siege by "Russian government cyber actors," as described by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
The ease-of-exploit rating has made the financial sector a cybercrime magnet for years, especially for targeted extortion attacks. The industry has fallen victim to numerous security breaches, data exfiltration hacks, DDoS attacks taking down global online operations and disrupting services, and has lost millions to malware and ransomware attacks. So what’s next?
Cryptomining transactions, seen as a terrific money-making scheme separate from the traditional online advertising, are growing faster than ever, concluded security researchers after 2.5 billion attacks were blocked in enterprise networks in the past six months.
In the past two years, cyberattacks on the financial sector have picked up speed. As companies in the sector struggle with the major shift toward digital transformation, some are caught off guard by the significant rise of malware designed specifically to target their sector, such as Dyre Trojan, Dridex, hybrid banking Trojan GozNym and TrickBot. Once the network is infiltrated, hackers can easily steal, read, alter and even erase top secret information.
Doctors can’t prescribe proper treatment for patients without identifying and analyzing symptoms to make a clinical diagnosis. It’s the same for CISOs, who are responsible for their organization’s digital health.
The deadline for full compliance with the European data protection law is right around the corner, but businesses still lack awareness and must overcome many security oversights. Surprisingly, as few as 38 percent of companies in the UK have actually heard of GDPR, according to a government survey. If businesses are not prepared by May 25, when the law takes full effect, they could face fines worth up to €20 million.
Government CIOs have a full agenda for 2018, including top investments in cloud services (19%), cybersecurity (17%) and big data analytics (16%), according to Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda Survey. The predictions are based on interviews with 3,160 CIOs from 98 countries, including 461 who work in government institutions.
2018 is the year that IoT, as well as artificial intelligence and robotics, will drive digital innovation and completely transform business models, found a Forbes Insights survey of over 500 senior executives from different countries.
In 2017, global spending on cybersecurity totaled about $86.4 billion, while in 2018 businesses will reportedly spend $93 billion, according to estimations from Gartner.
Each December, security researchers make predictions for the following year, and they always seems to sound the same: attacks will increase, malware will be more sophisticated because hackers are upping their game, so IT executives must secure their infrastructure or else. So what can enterprises expect from the threat landscape in 2018?
