Every October, the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies holds National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. While this attempt to raise awareness of cyberthreats (and others like it) are well-intentioned, they can inadvertently encourage organizations to be laser-focused on cybersecurity for certain periods of time and place it on the back burner for other portions of the year.
Falling into that sort of pattern can contribute to cybersecurity complacency. This is the sort of unpreparedness that makes businesses ripe targets for spear phishing, malware, ransomware, rootkits and other cyberattacks. Companies need to constantly keep themselves abreast of the biggest, most troublesome cybercrime trends and have C-level staff with persistence and bold vision overseeing information security initiatives.
Biggest threats on the horizon
Most professionals in the cybersecurity space readily acknowledge that hackers are working just as intensely as security specialists on their side of the line, hoping to invalidate security advances as soon as they come out. As an example, there's WPA3, the newest Wi-Fi security standard, first announced in October 2018 and gradually emerging throughout the past year (largely among enterprises). According to Forbes, vulnerabilities in WPA3 became apparent in April 2019, just six months after its debut. While those flaws were quickly addressed, more surfaced during an examination in August.
This is hardly the only major threat to emerge in late 2018 and early 2019. Self-propagating fileless malware is another truly frightening exploit now in modern hackers' arsenals, as was seen in a Trojan attack that could automatically spread via removable media, per SC Magazine. Forbes also noted that biometric system hacks are making facial-verification methods alarmingly vulnerable.
Invest wisely in cybersecurity
Certain aspects of security have emerged as being particularly important to tech leaders. In an interview with TechCrunch, venture capitalist Amit Karp of Bessemer Venture Partners cited application security as a major priority, largely due to the proliferation of third-party and open-source code in so many enterprise apps. Encryption will likely be another major focus, especially in light of incidents like the NSO Group's hack of WhatsApp to allegedly spy on journalists and political dissidents all over the world, per The Washington Post, as will advanced ransomware attacks and similarly burgeoning threats.
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