“I genuinely believe we are only a whisker away from some form of catastrophic event that could do damage to the world economy or critical infrastructure,” says Art Coviello, Executive Vice President EMC, Executive Chairman RSA, The Security Division of EMC.
Coviello believes that while the trend of targeted cyber-attacks will largely continue, the underlying tactics and the people behind these tactics will continue to evolve, ultimately changing the larger security landscape in 2013.
Organizations must now more than ever, approach security with the assumption that a security breach will occur and look beyond traditional security practices to leverage more intelligent systems to provision comprehensive protection.
Below are his predictions for the upcoming year:
- The hackers will likely get even more sophisticated. Evidence of criminals collaborating with rogue nation states, exchanging methodologies, buying and selling information, and even subcontracting their respective capabilities expands their collective reach and enhances their mutual learning curves.
- Increasing investments to provision pervasive mobility together with the steady adoption of cloud services will expand the attack surfaces at the expense of the perimeter.
- Changes will occur whether security teams are ready or not and enterprises will realize the need to address the critical skills shortage of security professionals
- National governments will continue will continue to struggle to legislate on rules of evidence, information sharing and reforming privacy laws. Lack of privacy reform is particularly troublesome based on today’s realities because many organizations have literally been put in the position of violating one set of privacy laws if they take the necessary steps to protect information, which they are legally obligated to do based on another set of privacy laws.
- It is highly likely that a rogue nation state, hacktivists or even terrorists will move beyond intrusion and espionage to attempt meaningful disruption and, eventually, even destruction of critical infrastructure.
- Responsible people in organizations from all verticals, industries and governments will move to that newer intelligence-based security model and pressure governments to act on our collective behalf.
- There will be significant uptake in investment for cloud-oriented security services to mitigate the effects of the serious shortage in cyber security skills.
- Big Data analytics will be used to enable an intelligence-based security model. Big Data will transform security enabling true defense in depth against a highly advanced threat environment.
