Pierluigi Paganini December 27, 2019

The 2020 Cybersecurity Landscape – Below Pierluigi Paganini’s cybersecurity predictions for the next twelve months.

Here we are again for the annual prediction of the events that I believe will impact the cybersecurity landscape in the next year. Let’s try to imagine what threats and bad actors will influence the cyber arena in the next 12 months.

1) Targeted ransomware attacks on the rise

In 2020, we will witness an increase in targeted ransomware attacks. Threat actors behind ransomware campaigns will switch tactics, leveraging access to organizations available for sale in the cybercrime underground.

Targeted ransomware attacks require a more accurate intelligence-gathering activity on the victims, but they can allow criminals to earn much more money and inflict maximum disruption to the victims.

This new tactic will allow threat actors to tailor attacks to organizations and large enterprises in almost any industry.

The targeted ransomware technique will lead to increased ransomware demands. Hospitals, school districts and municipalities continue to be privileged targets of cybercriminal organizations likely because they have limited resources and poor cyber hygiene.

2) Most nation-state attacks remain unattributed

Geopolitical tensions will cause a significant increase of cyber espionage campaigns and disruptive cyberattacks. Once again, the lack of a global framework of norms of state behavior in cyberspace and the absence of sanctions for rogue nation-state actors will continue to encourage state-sponsored hacking.

APT groups linked to Russia and China will carry out numerous operations against countries worldwide, respectively aimed at Western and Asian states. The level of sophistication of campaigns carried out by nation-state actors will continue to increase, making it impossible to attribute to specific threat actors. In 2020, the number of attacks associated with Advanced Persistent Threat actors that haven’t been previously identified by the security researchers will increase.

3) IoT devices under attack

The exponential increase in the number of IoT devices, along with the 5G networks roll out, will dramatically increase the number of attacks against smart devices on a large scale.

We will see a rapid increase in the number of IoT botnets, even if most of them will be based on the best-known bot (i.e., the Mirai bot).

Although the device vendors are implementing new security features in their systems, a lot of them from many manufacturers still do not implement security-by-design, making these systems easy to hack.

I expect that specific segments of IoT may become more secure over time, but the main problem with these families of devices could be that the speed to market takes precedence over security. This is a dangerous process, resulting in a growing number of vulnerabilities in the devices that could be exploited by attackers.

The complete list of “Top #Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020” is available at the following URL:

https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/top-cybersecurity-predictions-for-2020/

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – cybersecurity predictions, hacking)

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