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The 12 days of Christmas security predictions – what lies in the year ahead

Marked by a shortage of cyber security talent and attackers willing to exploit any vulnerability to achieve their aims, this year emphasised the need for organisations to invest in security and understand their risk posture. With the number of vendors in the cyber security market rapidly growing, rising standard for managing identities and access, and organisations investing more in security tools, 2020 will be a transformational year for the sector.

According to Rob Norris, VP Head of Enterprise & Cyber Security EMEIA at Fujitsu:

“We anticipate that 2020 will be a positive year for security, and encourage public and private sector to work together to bring more talent to the sector and raise the industry standards. As the threat landscape continues to expand with phishing and ransomware still popular, so will the security tools, leaving organisations with a variety of solutions. Next year will also be marked by a rush to create an Artificial Intelligence silver-bullet for cyber security and a move from old-fashioned password management practices to password-less technologies.”

“As cyber criminals continue to find new ways to strike, we’ll be working hard to help our customers across the world to prepare their people, processes and technology to deal with these threats. One thing to always keep in mind is that technology alone cannot stop a breach - this requires a cultural shift to educate employees across organisations about data and security governance. After all, people are always at the front line of a cyber-attack.”

Rob Norris’ “12 Days of Christmas” security predictions for the coming year are:

1. A united front for cyber security talent development

The scarce talent pool of cyber security specialists has become a real problem with various reports estimating a global shortage of 3.5 million unfulfilled positions by 2021. New approaches to talent creation need to be considered.

The government, academia, law enforcement and businesses all have a part to play in talent identification and development and will need to work collaboratively to provide different pathways for students who may not ordinarily be suited to the traditional education route. Institutions offering new cyber security courses for technically gifted individuals are a great starting point, but more will need to be done in 2020 if the shortage is to be reduced.

2. Cloud adoption expands the unknown threat landscape

While the transition to cloud-based services will provide many operational, business and commercial benefits to organisations, there will be many CISO’s working to understand the risks to their business with new data flows, data storage and new services. Traditional networks, in particular, boundaries and control of services are typically very well understood while the velocity and momentum of cloud adoption services leaves CISO’s with unanswered questions. Valid concerns remain around container security, cloud storage, cloud sharing applications, identity theft and vulnerabilities yet to be understood, or exposed.

3. The Brexit effect

The UK and European markets are suffering from uncertainty around the UK’s departure from the European Union, which will affect the adoption of cyber security services, as organisations will be reticent to spend until the impact of Brexit is fully understood.

The implications of data residency legislation, hosting, corporation tax, EU-UK security collaboration and information sharing are all questions that will need to be answered in 2020 post-Brexit. There is a long-standing collaborative relationship between the UK and its EU counterparts including European Certs and Europol and whilst the dynamics of those working relationships should continue, CISO’s and senior security personnel will be watching closely to observe the real impact.

4. SOAR revolution

Threat intelligence is a domain that has taken a while for organisations to understand in terms of terminology and real business benefits. SOAR is another domain that will take time to be understood and adopted, but the business benefits are also tangible. At a granular level, the correct adoption of SOAR will help organisations map, understand and improve their business processes. By making correct use of their technology stack and associated API’s early adopters will get faster and enhanced reporting and will improve their security posture through the reduction of the Mean Time To Respond (MTTR) to threats that could impact their reputation, operations and bottom-line.

**5. Further market fragmentation will frustrate CISOs **

The cyber security market is an increasingly saturated one, often at the frustration of CISO’s who are frequently asked to evaluate new products. Providers that can offer a combined set of cyber security services that deliver clear business outcomes will gain traction as they can offer benefits over the use of disparate security technologies such as a reduction in contract management, discount provisioned across services, single point of contacts and reduction in services and technologies to manage.

Providers that continue to acquire security technologies to enhance their stack such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) or technology analytics, will be best positioned to provide the full Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services that organisations need.

6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will need real security

There is a rush to create an AI silver-bullet for cyber security however, there is currently a lack of focus on security for AI. It is likely we will see a shift towards this research area as “adversarial” approaches to neural networks could potentially divulge partial or complete data points that the model was trained on. It is also possible to extract parts of a model leading to intellectual property theft as well as the ability to craft “adversarial” AI which can manipulate the intended model. Currently, it is hard to detect and remediate these attacks. There will need to be more focus on explainable AI, which would allow for response and remediation on what are currently black-box models.

7. Organisations will need to understand how to make better use of security tools and controls at their disposal

The well-established cloud platforms already contain many integrated security features but organisations are failing to take advantage of these features, partly because they do not know about them. A greater understanding of these features will allow organisations to make smarter investment decisions and we expect to see a growing demand for advice and services that allow organisations to optimally configure and monitor those technologies to ensure they have minimal risk and exposure to threats.

Fujitsu predicted last year that securing multi-cloud environments will be key going forward and organisations continue to need to find a balance of native and third-party tools to drive the right solution for their objectives.

8. Do you Wannacry again?

January 2020 sees the official end of support life for all variants of Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, which share elements of the same code base. This means that both end-user devices and data center servers will be equally vulnerable to the same exploits and opens the possibility that organisations could be susceptible to attacks that cause large outages.

In 2017, Wannacry surfaced and caused some well-publicised outages including well-known organisations from across the healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and aerospace industries. Microsoft had released patches two months before and recommended using a later version of the impacted components. We also learned in 2017, via Edward Snowden, that nation-states have built up an armoury of previously undisclosed exploits. These exploits are documented to target the majority of publicly available Operating Systems and so it stands to reason that cyber criminals could have also built a war chest of tools which will surface once the end of vendor support has passed for these Operating systems.

9. Rising the standard for managing identities and access

2020 will see organisations continuing their adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures and a ‘cloud-first’ attitude for applications. This creates the challenge of managing the expanding bundle of associated identities and credentials across the organisation.

Identities and associated credentials are the key attack vector in a data breach - they are ‘keys to the kingdom’. Without sufficient controls, especially for those with privileged rights, it is becoming increasingly difficult for organisations to securely manage identities and mitigate the risk of a data breach. Capabilities such as Federation Authentication, Single Sign-On and Adaptive Multi-Factor address the challenge of balance between security and usability, and we see this becoming standard, if not required, practice in 2020.

10. Extortion phishing on the rise

We are seeing an increase in a form of phishing that would have a recipient believe their potentially embarrassing web browsing and private activity has been observed with spyware and will be made public unless a large ransom is paid.

Since their widespread emergence last year, the techniques used by these extortionists to evade filters continue to develop. Simple text-only emails from single addresses now come from ‘burnable’ single-use domains. Glyphs from the Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian and extended Latin alphabets are being used to substitute letters in the email to bypass keyword filters and Bitcoin wallets are rotated often and used to associate a recipient with a payment.

The psychological tricks used in the wording of these emails will develop and likely aid their continued success.

11. Passwords become a thing of the past

Next year we will see a move from old-fashioned password management practices to password-less technologies. The increasing number of cases where privileged credentials and passwords are required, but are painful to manage in secure and cost effective, way will drive this shift. Passwords are easy to forget and the increasing complexity requirements placed upon users increases the chances of passwords having to be written down – which is self-defeating. Biometric technologies and ephemeral certificates will provide a more secure and user-friendly way to manage credentials and ensure assets and data are kept secure.

12. Ransomware not so random

In 2019, we observed a shift in the way certain ransomware ransom notes were constructed. Traditionally, ransomware notes are generic template text informing the victim that their files are encrypted and that they must pay a set amount of Bitcoin in order to have their files unencrypted. When threat actors successfully deploy ransomware network-wide and achieve other deployment objectives, they inform their victims their files are encrypted. Crucially, however, they do not reveal the price they demand for their decryption. Instead, threat actors seek to open a dialogue with the victim to discuss a price. This change has seen organisations employ negotiators to work with threat actors on managing and, hopefully, reducing the demand and we expect this to continue in 2020.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Fujitsu .