Top tips for cyber security next year

Only 10% of companies will be ready for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation by the May 2018 deadline and, by the end of the year, we will see the first companies closing due to fines.

That’s a prediction from Colin Tankard, Managing Director of data security company, Digital Pathways. And here are his other nine predictions for the cyber market next year.

1. A major cloud player will be shut down for 24 hours due to a cyber attack and data loss. This will trigger users to question their providers as to levels of encryption, where are the keys held and who has access to them? There will be growth in third party security. Services such as Bring Your Own Key (BOYE) will be the mantra, as companies will no longer trust a single cloud vendor and will spread their data around a number of providers.
2. IOT security will remain weak, even with the launch of light encryption. This will be due to manufactures still using old chipsets that have security flaws.
3. Email security will be one of the fastest growing areas in data security as ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks increase and more companies are fined, due to leaked data from intercepted emails or, rogue emails being received.
4. There is likely to be a grave shortage of skilled staff to plug the GDPR need, especially in the rise of the Data Protection Officer, now mandatory within the GDPR regulations.
5. Voice recognition will be widely deployed as a form of two-factor authentication, given the improvements in Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google.
6. At present around 31% of companies pay ransom-ware demands. This will reach 50% in 2018.
7. File-less attacks will be the new attack Trojan. These viruses reside in the memory of the PC and remain there until it is rebooted. Normal AV will not detect these attacks.
8. Social engineering attacks will increase as a way to get into an organisation. This will lead to an increase in detection systems being deployed inside an organisation so as to spot unusual behaviour, both in people and systems.
9. We will all start calling our cars KIT as we move into the driverless era!