Sophisticated threats remain one of the main concerns in enterprises today. As environments grow in complexity, malware actors find innovative ways to infiltrate overlooked entry points in the network, hiding behind the scenes to wreak havoc without ever making a full-blown appearance.
2020 will bring the end of Windows 7, following Microsoft’s announcement that it will no longer offer support and updates for the operating system starting January 14, 2020. But companies appear to have had a good run with it and are not yet ready to say goodbye, a Kollective survey of 1,000 US and UK enterprise IT professionals has found.
Critical national infrastructures such as the energy sector, public transportation, commercial facilities, government and defense, and medical services, among others, have been under attack in recent years, following a large volume of security vulnerabilities and a lack of encryption.
Data breaches not only cost companies millions, but they also inflict reputational damage, customer turnover and operational costs. The average cost of a data breach has risen 6.4% to a global average of $3.86 million this year, according to research from the Ponemon Institute.
Many cybersecurity organizations are of the opinion that threat intelligence can prevent, or if not prevent entirely at least lessen, the impact of successful breaches.
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?
There’s been a continuous increase in the use of Machine Learning but, despite the recent hype, the technology is not new. While researchers have been playing with artificial neural networks from as early as the 1950s, machine learning is not new even in the context of cybersecurity.
Demand for cybersecurity experts will increase and become a priority for enterprises, leading to an estimated need for over 1 million cybersecurity professionals in India by 2020 and over 500,000 in the US. The US currently employs 780,000 specialists in cybersecurity, while 350,000 posts are still unfilled, reports CyberSeek, project supported by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
In 2016, the number of ransomware attacks increased 300 percent from 2015, with over 4,000 attacks detected per day, according to US government statistics. Ransomware is among the worst types of infection, as it not only encrypts network data, but in the end may cost victims all their data – even if they pay the ransom. It should be a priority for all businesses and organizations in 2017.
A warning has been issued that companies who have installed the popular Cisco WebEx extension on Chrome could have opened themselves up to malicious attacks.
Ransomware, the most prolific cyber threat of the moment, gains foothold in organizations and companies via file-sharing networks, e-mail attachments, malicious links or compromised websites that allow direct downloads.
