Cyber threats businesses face in 2014
The year 2013 brought another reality check to IT and security professionals. While Sri Lankan businesses continued to transform, by embracing mobility, moving to the cloud, expanding social collaboration and creating and sharing extraordinary volumes of data, cybercriminals likewise continued to transform and scale-up their operations.
Threat Predictions for 2014 are:
1. The malware designed to capture identity and financial information will increase in volume and complexity to crossover from desktops to mobile devices.
2. The attackers will leverage more on destructive functions within their attack code. Hence, the mobile device based click-jacking, watering hole attacks, and new exploits of choice and attacks will continue to increase.
Sujit Christy
3. Mobile banking too will suffer from more MitM (Man-in-the-Middle) type attacks; basic two-step verification will no longer be sufficient.
4. More ransomware programs, which operate like a computer specific ‘denial-of-service’ attack. They block access to a computer file system or encrypt data files stored in the computer. The ransomware, which used to target consumers, will now also target enterprises. Escalating new and sophisticated versions of ransomware and botnet-driven threats will allow attackers to monetise their efforts quickly.
5. Hacktivist groups will continue to target governments and are expected to spill over and target private enterprise.
6. Cybercriminals will increasingly use targeted-attack-type methodologies like open source research and highly customised spear phishing to financially exploit targets.
7. Attacks leveraging vulnerabilities in widely used but unsupported software like Java 6 and Windows XP will intensify.
8. Attackers will aim to exploit lax security architectures and policy, and skills shortages, using tried and tested measures.
9. Data privacy in the cloud will be a hot subject and encryption will come back into fashion. Organisations will need to treat privacy as both a compliance and business risk issue, to reduce regulatory sanctions and commercial impacts, such as reputational damage and loss of customers due to privacy breaches.
10. The Internet of things has increased organisations’ dependence on the Internet and technology. Securing this new space may require a creative approach to security as a fundamental component of even the tiniest processors.
Importantly, the age-old notion of a security perimeter has, today, been replaced by data centres, endpoints, networks, user-owned BYOD devices, virtualised devices, network guests, outsourced IT services, third-party cloud infrastructure, etc. And CIOs and CISOs now know that they will be held responsible for anything that goes wrong with IT operations, whether or not they could have prevented it. This means they will demand more transparency and assurances, and will be feeling more pressure than ever before, balancing unlimited responsibility with a very limited ability to control circumstances.
Hence, today’s reality is this: No matter what business you are in, no matter where in the world you are – if you have data, then your business is at constant risk. From the outside in, to the inside out, threats are increasing as quickly as you can implement measures against them, and in spite of tremendous technology investment, many organisations are still ill-prepared for attacks. Threats to sensitive data can occur at anytime, anywhere; originating from a cyber-criminal group or even within an organisation. It’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when”.
Cyber-criminals will never stop trying to compromise systems to obtain data. As a consequence, organisations must always be aware of where they may be open to attacks, how attackers can enter their environment and what to do if and when an attack occurs.
(The writer is a Governance, Risk and Compliance professional and Director at Layers-7 Seguro Consultoria (Pvt) Ltd. He could be reached atsujit@layers-7.com).