As 2015 approaches, it is time for new year resolutions and wishes. For security industry, we are busy preparing for another eventful year!!
When preparing for our budget and project portfolios, it maybe useful to look at predictions from leading security vendors. Cyber security is an intelligence game. Can Websense, Sophos, FireEye and TrendMicro predictions help us? I will write another post to provide my thoughts.
Legend : Orange cells are directly related to Smartphone. Red words are related to payment systems.
2015 Cyber Security Predictions
| Websense | Sophos | FireEye | TrendMicro |
| Healthcare will see a substantial increase of data stealing attack campaigns |
Exploit mitigations reduce the number of useful vulnerabilities | Mobile and Web-based viruses remain a scourge, and hardly a week goes by without hearing of another data breach or a new malware. | More cybercriminals will turn to darknets to share attack tools, stage attacks, and market stolen goods. |
| Attacks on the Internet of Things will focus on business use cases, not consumer products |
Internet of Things attacks move from proof-of-concept to mainstream risks |
Mobile ransomware will surge in popularity. Cryptolocker attained a measure of success this year, and so attention is expected to further turn to mobile in order for attackers to gain access to your phone and contacts. | There will be bolder hacking attempts as cyber activity increases. |
| Credit card thieves will morph into information dealers |
Encryption becomes standard, but not everyone is happy about it | Point-of-sale (PoS) attacks will also become a more popular method of stealing data and money — and PoS attacks will strike a broader group of victims with increasing frequency. | An exploit kit that specifically targets Android users will surface. |
| Authentication consolidation on the phone will trigger data-specific exploits, but not for stealing data on the phone |
More major flaws in widely-used software that had escaped notice by the security industry over the past 15 years |
As retailers strengthen their defenses and more criminals get into the game, cyberattacks will spread to “middle layer” targets including payment processors and PoS management firms. | Targeted attacks will become a norm. |
| New vulnerabilities will emerge from decades old source code |
Regulatory landscape forces greater disclosure and liability, particularly in Europe |
Attacks on the enterprise supply chain will surge, as less mature or financially able companies become weak links in an ecosystem where only top firms can bolster their defenses to acceptable standards. | Bugs in open source apps will continue to be exploited. |
| Email threats will take on a new level of sophistication and evasiveness |
Attackers increase focus on mobile payment systems, but stick more to traditional payment fraud for a while |
Lack of adequate response could result in a major brand going out of business | New mobile payment methods will introduce new threats. |
| As companies increase access to cloud and social media tools, command and control instructions will increasingly be hosted on legitimate sites |
Global skills gap continues to increase, with incident response and education a key focus |
With such risks in the corporate realm, cyber insurance as an industry is expected to grow. | We won’t see head-on IoE/IoT device attacks, but the data they process will tell another story. |
| There will be the new (or newly revealed) players on the global cyber espionage/cyber war battlefield |
Attack services and exploit kits arise for mobile (and other) platforms | More severe online banking and other financially motivated threats will surface. | |
| The gap between ICS/SCADA and real world security only grows bigger |
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| Interesting rootkit and bot capabilities may turn up new attack vectors |