Cybersecurity Trends for 2023

this year has been a tough one for cyber security especially if you were one of the folks that got hacked and even if you weren't you might have been and you just don't know it yet that happens so let's take a look at what kinds of things have we seen overall Trends in the past year in cyber security so we'll take a look back and then we'll take a look forward into the future what can we look forward to in cyber security threats as well as hopefully good things that can occur I think there will be a mixture of good news and bad news with both so first of all looking back one of the things that continues to plague us is this notion of data breach that is the bad guys get into your system they dump your customer database they use it to mine for information that they can later use identity fraud scenarios with they steal the secret sauce the plans this sort of stuff and the business is compromised as a result the IBM ponderman survey that we run each year on the cost of a data breach shows that the cost of a data breach continues to be in excess of four million dollars per incident that has been the case for a number of years and it continues to be the case we've got to do a better job on this it's almost become so commonplace that we're numb to it and that can't be the case what's the cause of a lot of these data breaches well it turns out ransomware is at the core of many of them not all but many and ransomware is costing people individuals all the way up to the large organizations and even nation states as its effect is resulting in data loss it's resulting in extortion a lot of bad things happen here so those are a couple of bad trends that we see how about something good A little bit of good news for last year I'll say multi-factor authentication is one it's not a new idea but the idea that I can authenticate prove my identity to the system based upon something I know something I have and something I am those three things put all of those together or some combination maybe even get rid of the something I know the password it's a better user experience and it can lead to better security and what we've seen is more and more widespread adoption of multi-factor authentication that's going to be a good thing for us all and we've seen that start to take more hold in the past year now how about looking forward what kind of things have can we expect to see well I'm going to say it's going to be a little bit of Groundhog Day what we've seen in the past we're going to keep seeing in the future until we learn how to solve these problems data breach ransomware multi-factor authentication hopefully we'll continue to see more and more widespread use of that so the past continues to play into the future and influence the future but what are some other things that we'll see I think we're going to see a rise in attacks for Internet of Things internet of things or iot is basically the notion if you follow along with me turn everything into a computer your car becomes a computer that takes you places your refrigerator is a computer that keeps your food cold your DVR is a computer that shows you movies and in the iot trend everything becomes a computer and what we know from cyber security is that every computer can be hacked so if everything can be a computer and every computer can be hacked all of a sudden everything can be hacked your car your refrigerator your insulin pump your implantable defibrillator these are things that are going to be pretty scary when we start thinking about the whole world around us is potentially hackable that's an area that we have got to give more attention to another one that could come back to haunt us is the use of artificial intelligence by the bad guys on the positive side we've had the good guys using AI for some number of years we can use this to do a better job of security analysis of root cause analysis looking for what all of these indicators of compromise ultimately mean and figuring out what we need to do the good guys are using this to analyze and investigate the bad guys I think are going to start using it more and more to do things like develop attacks that are specific to an AI an artificial intelligence system would be able to maybe design new types of attacks to get into systems we could also as our businesses become more and more dependent upon artificial intelligence we are dependent upon the Corpus of knowledge that's in those systems so therefore if someone were able to poison the Corpus of knowledge then the AI would be giving advice and making decisions based on bad information so that's a different type of AI based attack all of these go into what we refer to as adversarial AI so there are a number of things that the bad guys could be doing where they're going to start using AI more which just means the good guys are going to have to start using our AI more still and another one that is very new and will continue to grow is the notion of a deep fake that is an audio or video file where we have a a person maybe a well-known person saying something that they never said and we tend to believe what we see and if it goes out on social media everyone will believe it before anyone has a chance to refute it imagine what happens if a video is leaked on Election Day showing a candidate saying something that they never said that was terrible it could be too late before we get the news cycle the next news cycle to correct the error it could also move the stock market if we had a CEO seeming to say certain information that would look bad about the company and cause the stock to crash even though they never said those words but we have an AI that can do that sort of simulation we're going to have to get smarter about how to detect a deep fake from an authentic video as an example other things that we'll see quantum computers are very useful in solving problems that traditional computers have not been able to do to do simulations and things of that sort that we just don't have the Computing capacity to process with a conventional computer so a Quantum system could solve those problems in record time also a Quantum system could potentially attack the cryptography that we have the asymmetric crypto algorithms that we rely on every day for all of our secure Communications could potentially be broken in what we thought would have taken decades or hundreds of years now with a well-tuned Quantum system in the future maybe being able to be broken in a matter of minutes so that means we're going to have to do some good work to make Quantum safe algorithms for cryptography and the good news is we've got these things in fact the National Institute of Standards uh recently this year came out with four algorithms that they published as being Quantum safe these are the algorithms that will protect against a quantum computer trying to crack our encrypted messages and databases and the like and four of those algorithms that were accepted of those four three of them in fact had IBM contributions to them so we're very proud of our work that we've done in this space and trying to protect people going forward into the future and then another Trend that has continued for a number of years and it shows no signs of letting up is a skills Gap in cyber security there's one website called cyberseek.org that says currently as I look at the website there are about 770 million unfilled cyber security jobs in the U.S alone that's right now and there's only about a million or so people working in the field so it's almost one-to-one for every job now there uh is an opening and we can't make cyber Security Experts that quickly with current technology we can create a new human in about nine months but if we're going to turn them into a cyber security expert it's going to take a few more years there's not anything that looks like we can suddenly start minting new Cyber Security Experts to fill the Gap but we can do some things to help and we can do things by working smarter using AI that I mentioned here to guide our security efforts using good tools to automate the responses that we have for security to do better analysis and become Force multipliers for the people that we do have also we need to do a lot more training for the people that are out there not only our end users so that they don't put us in such a bad place to begin with but also Security Professionals and create more Security Professionals so it's going to be a multi-pronged approach but these are the things that I think we're going to be able to see both on the positive and the negative as we start looking forward to the future of cyber security foreign

Channel: IBM Technology

Views: 74,379

Keywords: IBM, IBM Cloud, IBM Security, IT Security, Quantum Safe, Quantum Computing, MFA, Multi-factor Authentication, Multifactor Authentication, Multi Factor Authentication, Data Breach, Deep Fake, AI, Artificial Intellegence, Cyber Security, Cybersecurity, Cyber-Security

Id: uAHFNuDlcRw

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022