As we become increasingly dependent on technology in our daily lives we open ourselves up to an entirely new kind of threat, cyberattacks.
While in the late 90s and early 2000s cybersecurity went as far as your company's IT guy, today it's a multi-billion dollar global industry that is expected to top $1 trillion by 2020. Whether it's an email scam targeted at individuals or corporate data theft affecting millions of people at one time, the rise in cyberattacks and their increasing reach has made cybersecurity a very hot topic.
When we started thinking about cybersecurity and where it's heading, one of the first issues brought up was the internet of things. Someone tampering with your computer while you're surfing the web is an inconvenience, but what about someone hacking into your car while you're driving down the highway?
So, in an effort to ease our fears and gain a better perspective we decided to ask a group of cybersecurity experts…
What's the future of cybersecurity?
It was not an easy question to answer. Here's what they had to say…
Ondrej Vlcek, CTO & GM of Consumer at Avast
"In 10-15 years, we will be deep in a 'war of the machines' era with advances in artificial intelligence bringing fast and sophisticated execution of security defense and cybercrime. This will be a battle of AI vs AI.
The availability of low cost computing and storage, off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms, AI code and open AI platforms will drive increased AI use by the good guys to defend and protect – but also increase deployment of AI by the bad guys. There will be sophisticated attacks launched on a grand scale, quickly and intelligently with little human intervention, that compromise our digital devices and web infrastructure.
Cybercriminals will create fully autonomous, AI-based attacks that will operate completely independently, adapt, make decisions on their own and more. Security companies will counter this by developing and deploying AI-based defensive systems. Humans will simply supervise the process."
Adnan Amjad, Partner at Deloitte
"Employers will look further outside of IT for tech talent. Organizations aren't just looking for the standard computer engineer anymore.
While they still need the engineers, the developers, data scientists and the technological tools to write, pull and track data, the need to have professionals who can make sense of all of that data and communicate it back to the executive team in business terms that they can understand is becoming increasingly important.
How someone is able to present technical information and frame it as a business problem is going to be in high demand. We will see more organizations looking outside the traditional skill set to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity professionals."
Daniel Miessler, Directory of Advisory Services at IOActive
"A big trend I see is a focus on service resilience, i.e., making it so that a DDoS can melt one provider or one datacenter, but your service will automatically migrate to another site that can serve the same content.
Expect resilience, as opposed to prevention, will become more talked about."
John Bambenek, Threat Systems Manager at Fidelis Cybersecurity
"We can expect the unexpected. I never would have predicted last year that we would be talking about the DNC and hacking of elections.
Expect new trends to come out of left field. Ransomware will be on the upswing and evolve in new unforeseen ways. It will be more targeted and focus on more valuable targets as we saw with healthcare. And it will continue to attack new, more damaging industries like we recently witnessed with San Francisco BART and Muni.
Like the attacks with Krebs and Dyn, DDoS is coming back in a big way. Thanks to the proliferation of insecure things on the Internet, the risk of crippling cyberattacks will only increase."