{"id":22033,"date":"2016-11-29T05:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-11-29T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/?p=22033"},"modified":"2021-04-23T11:46:05","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T18:46:05","slug":"2017-cybersecurity-predictions-year-get-serious-iot-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/2017-cybersecurity-predictions-year-get-serious-iot-security\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 Cybersecurity Predictions: The Year We Get Serious About IoT Security"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing blog series examining \u201cSure Things\u201d (predictions that are almost guaranteed to happen) and \u201cLong Shots\u201d (predictions that are less likely to happen) in cybersecurity in 2017.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Throughout 2016, cybersecurity moved more into the public eye than ever before. Hacks into the Democratic National Committee, BitFinex, Yahoo, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Verizon were just a few of the high-profile security breaches that grabbed headlines this year.<\/p>\n

With 2017 fast approaching, we expect that we\u2019ll continue to see breaches in the news. Let\u2019s look at some predictions for the new year around network security:<\/p>\n

Sure Things<\/h3>\n

Phishing attacks will continue to increase\u2026and be effective<\/strong><\/p>\n

While phishing has been around for a long time, it continues to be a very successful method of attack for hackers. The 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report<\/a> cites 30 percent of phishing messages were opened by the target, with a median time of the first click on a malicious attachment being within the first three minutes and 45 seconds. It\u2019s effective, and it works. In their Q2 2016 Phishing Activity Trends Report<\/a>, Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) observed 466,065 unique phishing sites in Q2 CY2016 \u2013 up 61 percent from the previous quarter\u2019s record in Q1 CY2016. Seagate<\/a> Technology, Snapchat<\/a>, and Polycom<\/a> are just a few examples where spear phishing attacks compromised employee payroll information in 2016. With attackers creating ever-more-realistic-looking emails and landing pages, we\u2019re only going to see more of this in 2017.<\/p>\n

Security organizations will begin to move away from security sprawl and towards true automation<\/strong><\/p>\n

To counter the malicious activities coming at them, security operations teams need to be more agile than ever \u2013 that means more visibility into what\u2019s coming at them, a reduction of noise, and automating for faster response.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, security teams have bolted on additional security solutions to address new threats. This has led to management frustration \u2013 coordinating security resources (oftentimes manually) from a variety of security solutions and vendors where the components don\u2019t talk to each other or share knowledge. Security organizations will start to migrate toward solutions that are more contextually aware and security platforms that can share information across the attack surface, utilizing analytics for automated detection and response.<\/p>\n

Internet of Things (IoT) attacks become a thing<\/strong><\/p>\n

Experts have been sounding warnings about IoT security vulnerabilities for a few years now, and while hacks have<\/a> been<\/a> demonstrated<\/a>, until recently we hadn\u2019t seen a lot of widely reported malicious activity. That changed in a big way towards the end of 2016. We saw the largest DDoS attack ever delivered by a botnet made up of IoT devices<\/a> and a major attack on Dyn<\/a> just a month later led to a massive internet outage across the U.S. and parts of Western Europe.<\/p>\n

Gartner estimates that there are 6.4 billion connected things worldwide in use this year, a number expected to reach 20.8 billion by 2020. That\u2019s a lot of targets.<\/p>\n

Ease of use will be key to the success of IoT devices, but requiring individual users to constantly update their security wrinkles the user experience. Will \u201cUncle Joe\u201d really go through the process of updating the default password on his new connected thermostat? Probably not \u2013 and that leaves a gaping hole for breaches depending on other connections in his network. I expect we\u2019ll look back and view 2017 as the year IoT attacks really started \u2013 and also when we got serious as an industry about preventing them.<\/p>\n

Long Shot<\/h3>\n

Ransomware encroaches on IoT devices <\/strong><\/p>\n

DDoS attacks are one thing, but what about ransomware on IoT devices? Ransomware has traditionally been used to hold an organization\u2019s valuable data hostage by locking down the computers that store that data. Attacks often come into an organization through things like Adobe Flash or executable files.<\/p>\n

IoT devices don\u2019t generally store sensitive data and often don\u2019t have the interfaces to deliver ransom notes. Malicious actors of course tend to be motivated by profits and it\u2019s still easier, more efficient, and more profitable today to go after data where it resides. But the vulnerabilities in IOT devices will eventually lend themselves to ransomware that threatens immediate damage \u2013 shutting down a power grid or production line, for example.<\/p>\n

As we start to see connected devices exploited more often for DDoS attacks, additional kinds of exploits are sure to follow \u2013 the question is whether it will become a profitable enough endeavor for bad actors to take mainstream in the next year.<\/p>\n

What are your cybersecurity predictions around network security? Share your thoughts in the comments and be sure to stay tuned for the next post in this series where we\u2019ll share predictions for endpoint security.<\/p>\n

\"cp17-infographic-phase2\"<\/span><\/div><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing blog series examining \u201cSure Things\u201d (predictions that are almost guaranteed to happen) and \u201cLong Shots\u201d (predictions that are less likely to happen) in cybersecurity in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":22037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155,229],"tags":[3022],"coauthors":[3023,980],"class_list":["post-22033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity-2","category-predictions","tag-2017-predictions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/CP17-Linkedin-698x400-NS-100.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22033"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130862,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22033\/revisions\/130862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22033"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}