FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY
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It is expected that
cybercrime will cost the
world US$6 trillion by
2021, with global spending
on information security
products and services
set to grow by 8.7% this
year to US$124 billion.
Ashraf Sheet, Regional
Director, Middle East and
Africa at Infoblox, looks at
some of the cybersecurity
trends that seem poised
to significantly alter the
landscape in 2019.
Data exfiltration attacks to
target the cloud
In recent years, enterprises have widely
moved their data to the cloud using
Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service
cloud models such as AWS and Azure. With
a significant amount of corporate data in
the cloud, attacks on cloud platforms are
bound to increase. With the adoption of
Office365, there has been a surge of attacks
on Office365 services, especially attempts to
compromise email. The past few years have
also seen many high-profile data breaches
attributed to misconfigured Amazon S3
buckets. The problem is that many of these
buckets are owned by vendors in their supply
chains rather than by the target enterprises.
These open buckets and credentials allow
bad actors to easily attack S3 buckets.
Cryptojacking will continue to
be in the headlines
Attacks powered by AI
For a long time, attackers have used evasive
techniques to bypass security measures
and avoid detection. Recently, however, an
entire underground economy consisting of
products, tools and dedicated services has
emerged to assist attackers. Considering the
ease with which attackers can outsource key
components of the attacks, it is predicted
that evasion techniques will become more
agile due to Artificial Intelligence in 2019.
Malware evasive techniques to bypass
Machine Learning engines have increased
in recent years. Bypassing AI engines has
already been on criminal’s to-do-list for a
while. This year though, it is projected that
criminals will also be able to implement AI in
their malicious software to automate target
selection and check infected devices before
deploying next stage malware and anti-
detection technologies.
Cryptocurrency mining has increased
both as a topic of interest and activity
as usage has grown exponentially in the
last few years. Nowadays, it is impossible
to see any technology news feed without
articles on cryptocurrency and Blockchain.
Cryptojacking is a way for cybercriminals
to take over the computing devices and
smartphones and take advantage of the
CPU power to mine cryptocurrency.
Cybercriminals infect victims’ phones
and smartphones with malware, which
uses the CPU power of the device to
mine cryptocurrency, with the profits
being directed back into the wallet of the
attacker. The attack is not easy to detect
because aside from the heavy use of the PC
fan and driving up the energy cost of using
the computer, cryptojacking doesn’t make
itself obvious. An average victim won’t
Cybersecurity
predictions for 2019
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