Cyber Security trends 2019

With identity theft on the rise, identity management has been a hot topic for discussion in the cyber world. More companies are investing into cyber security to try and protect their customers, and themselves, from identity theft. Advances in the development of artificial intelligence are leading to AI becoming embedded into most business applications as a more effective cyber security tool.

Data breaches are happening more often and costing businesses and consumers billions every year. Most businesses don’t even discover their data breaches until more than six months have passed. By that time, 90 per cent of hackers have already covered their tracks through encryption.

Read the top cyber security trends of 2019.

The zero trust model

A new trend for 2019 is the ‘zero trust model’. This approach eliminates the idea that internal partners are trustworthy individuals who mean no harm. Zero trust security continually evaluates an individual’s behaviour and actions to identify and eliminate potential threats. As part of this model, a risk score is attached to all stakeholders; this includes managers, employees, business partners and any other stakeholders.

Attackers will target consumer devices

This year, it is expected that cyber attackers will target consumer devices, which could put consumers’ personal data at risk. Companies of all shapes and sizes have experienced ransomware attacks but consumers have not yet experienced them on a similar large scale, as it is predicted they soon will. This new level of cyber attack could damage the reputation of many businesses.

More ransomware

Ransomware has been a commonly used cyber weapon both because it has such devastating effects and because of its simplicity.

John Fokker, head of cyber investigations at McAfee, predicts that the ransomware underworld will “consolidate”, creating “fewer but stronger malware-as-a-service families that will actively work together”.

The return of blackmail

According to Paul Drapeau, enterprise architect at Carbon Black’s threat analysis unit, compromised data sets could very easily enable the return of traditional blackmail.

“Breaches in Facebook and other social media platforms represent a wealth of data to be mined by bad actors,” he explained. “This data could be used to correlate activities between people to find illegal, scandalous or compromising behaviour and then leverage that for traditional blackmail at scale.”

Protect your business with Cyber Essentials

Don’t let your business fall victim to one of these new cyber threats. Having Cyber Essentials protects your business against the growing threat from cyber attacks. This government-backed and industry-supported scheme enables organisations to showcase their credentials as trustworthy and secure when it comes to cyber security.