What will 2017 bring in Cyber Security?

Lots of people do these type of lists, but since this is the end of my first year in business, I might as well be no different.?

This might be an easy one to get right. Ransomware is already embedded in over 90%+ of all phishing e-mails, so there’s hardly any further room to keep growing. We’ve already started to see the way it is changing though. As was reported earlier this month, you could get your files unlocked if you infected two friends with this Ransomware rather than paying money over to the hackers.

We’ve seen record breaking botnets created this year by poorly designed and poorly secured smart devices (also referred to as IoT, e.g.- internet connected cameras, digital video records, internet routers, etc.). I suspect the evil doers are building a massive army, much bigger than anything we have seen to date. I believe that they will then carry out a coordinated attack on one of the big service providers (e.g.- Google, Amazon or Microsoft). The attack won’t be fully successful, but will have caused sufficient disruption to make smart device security a focus for all manufacturers of such devices, as insecure devices will be banned from accessing the web.

Yahoo! has really had a bad year, setting a world record, having already had an even bigger world record. I believe bigger leaks have already happened and will be revealed next year. I reckon the bad guys are already combing through the data, cracking passwords and will then create tools that will take the IDs and passwords they have and try these against other services (e-mail, social media, etc.) to generate a list of compromised accounts, which are extremely valuable on the dark net.

Russia has shown form this year, interfering with the US Presidential Election. With elections happening in the bigger European Countries (Germany, France and The Netherlands) in 2017, I would not be very surprised to discover that the Russian state hackers tried to influence the results of these.

I’ll be a bit selfish with this one as I will be the one helping these people to protect themselves. People knowing how to stay safe on-line will be the least likely to be affected by a Cyber Threat.

So I’ll come back in 364 days and see how I did. Then the following day, I’ll make another list. ?

Wishing all my clients and contacts and safe and secure 2017.

Let’s be careful out there.