{"id":44455,"date":"2019-12-19T10:58:06","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T10:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/?p=44455"},"modified":"2020-01-08T11:24:58","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T11:24:58","slug":"threatquotient-expert-makes-cyber-predictions-for-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/2019\/12\/19\/threatquotient-expert-makes-cyber-predictions-for-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"ThreatQuotient expert makes cyber predictions for 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ryan Trost, Co-founder and CTO, ThreatQuotient, makes his predictions for the cybersecurity landscape in 2020. <\/em><\/strong> He says: \u201cI predict 2020 will see at least one high-value OT network get infiltrated and held for ransom.\u201d   <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the 2020 budget meetings come\nand go – teams are forced to assess their current defences by analysing their\nhistorical attacks in order to anticipate\/predict future attack trends. A difficult\nbut worthwhile exercise for security leadership as they attempt to assess the\nadversaries\u2019 trajectory and work to remain several moves ahead. More often\nthan not, adversaries stay true to their methods but only make slight\nvariations to their attacks – why change what historically works? This leads me\nto my first 2020 premonition. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sharper concentration of cloud\nattacks.<\/em><\/strong> Companies continue to flock to cloud deployments, both private and\npublic, to regain budget and unburden their IT departments. Teams have\nslightly more control and oversight over private cloud deployments but the\npublic multi-tenant cloud deployments are target rich for an attacker. No need for\nthe adversary to enumerate their prey when they can infiltrate the \u2018entire\nherd\u2019. By studying how a single cloud technology operates from infrastructure\nto defences, adversaries become more efficient and significantly decrease their\nattack costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most adversaries are driven by\nfinancial gains and a significant operating metric for them revolves around\ntheir operational costs. Very similar\nto our defensive budgets, adversaries must weigh their operating costs against\ntheir potential profits. Therefore,\ntheir motivation to gain access to cloud environments provide an exponential\nfinancial gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not saying \u2018all\u2019 cloud deployments are doomed but security teams must absolutely have a voice at the table when deciding \u2018which\u2019 cloud environment. Security teams must evaluate and scrutinise cloud security practices to ensure due diligence is being performed by the vendor – for instance, ensuring the cloud vendor is undergoing routine penetration tests and not only resolving any weaknesses identified but asking how quickly their security team is identifying the penetration test. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Operational Technology line\nwill fall victim to a ransomware threat.<\/em><\/strong> Operational\nTechnology networks are the primary lifesource for oil, gas and energy\ncompanies, as well as, massive manufacturing industries such as automotive. These\nenvironments typically rely heavily on older infrastructure and technology and\nare infrequently updated to the latest security levels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, OT networks are overlooked because they don\u2019t have the traditional weak points most organisations are defending for two primary reasons: 1) They generally are not connected to the Internet and 2) Do not have the high number of end-users who are susceptible to crafty email spear phish attacks or \u2018click-happy\u2019 websurfing. But as manufacturers live and die by product branding the importance for a company to comply with criminal demands warrants a lofty ransom threat. I predict 2020 will see at least one high-value OT network get infiltrated and held for ransom.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Staggering surge of botnet armies.<\/em><\/strong> Botnet\narmies are nothing new, however, as endpoint devices in households become \u2018connected\u2019\nand schools provide each individual student with personal computing devices it\nopens the doors for widespread takeover. I can\nappreciate the benefits of every single student having a tablet (or equivalent)\nfor schooling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, I struggle to find the legitimacy of why my refrigerator needs an Internet connection, or for that matter, a video conferencing feature. As with any botnet army the individual devices don\u2019t hold any real threat value but when controlled in the masses they provide a formidable attack mechanism for cybercriminals. Whether used for computation resources (think brute forcing passwords) or used to launch denial of service attacks against a target the volume of botnet armies will surely increase exponentially. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Trost, Co-founder and CTO, ThreatQuotient, makes his predictions for the cybersecurity landscape in 2020. He says: \u201cI predict 2020 will see at least one high-value OT network get infiltrated and held for ransom.\u201d   As the 2020 budget meetings come and go – teams are forced to assess their current defences by analysing their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":44456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5307,5,36,3629,13,79],"tags":[2984,22,1563,1530,2561,1073,10918,9855],"class_list":["post-44455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-enterprise-security","category-intelligent-technology","category-newsletter","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-botnet","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-security","tag-cybersecurity","tag-endpoint","tag-internet","tag-ryan-trost","tag-threatquotient"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44455"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44719,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44455\/revisions\/44719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}