There is no organization left that has never encountered a hacking attack or a breach, whether it’s small or big, every organization have been breached at least once. Mikko Hyppönen, Chief research officer at F-Secure, said, “How many of the Fortune 500 are hacked right now? The answer: 500, they all have security breaches, big or small. If you have a big enough infrastructure, you won’t be able to secure all of it.” Many security researchers and professionals working on the defensive side in the cyber world can easily pick the trend and patterns of attacking vectors and most popular techniques and methods that attackers are coming with. There is a lot of information over the internet that is being targeted by them and is insecure, or we can say that is not fully secured. The experienced professionals have predicted many threats and risk that we may encounter in the future will expose our information. The continuing adoption of new technology and its access to personally identifiable information is the main reason that created new targets and types of cyber-attacks on the world of information security. Let’s start off by looking at some of the key factors that influence the current level of information security.
Re-authentication
In 2015, the re-authentication exploitation continued to grow rapidly. Attackers continue to target email accounts you use for password recovery and with that, trigger the forgot password function of a website and then steal the password reset before you notice. To overcome this exploitation, we are needed to protect the entire lifecycle of authentication, because if the authentication of a website is strong, but the re-authentication process is weak, the advantage goes to the attacker every time.
Ransomware
Ransomware continues to evolve in its technique and also expand from Windows only to Macs, Android and Linux in 2015. Although, backup software is easily available and cheap. Still, organizations are not backed up appropriately. Ransomware is the most critical attack that pays off in millions in virtual money to an attacker.
Cyber Extortion
Cyber extortion differs from ransomware because the hacker has stolen your information and he is threatening you to publish it publicly if you don’t pay. 2015 saw its share of this type of attack, and like ransomware, all signs indicate that the future is more devastating. Let’s talk about the current situation of IT industry that what is threatening them and what are the ongoing attacks that are more devastating than previous attacks.
Legacy Systems
Previously, the information systems were relatively secure by virtue of being hosted on large proprietary machines and connected to very little. Now the time has changed, there are a lot of users connected to the information systems and are accessing it from remote locations. It makes information system vulnerable and an easy target to attack. Nowadays, the information systems are built with security in mind, but what about the previous one. There are thousands of systems that are deployed with security measure or policy. These systems are the potential target for the attackers. As information system reveals millions of personal and confidential details and often reveals bug, it has become never ending target for the attackers.
Operating Systems
Most of the critical weaknesses in computer systems lie with the operating system itself. It is indicative that UNIX assumed its current features, of which “security” is probably not one. It shows that we lack security aspect far behind on the base level. That will be devastating in the coming years. In part because of its academic legacy people have been working on UNIX security, in many ways, harder than they do for any other operating system. Over time, therefore, absent major changes, one might expect UNIX to get more secured.
Security Tools
Security tools play an important role in the business world, where critical communications and information sharing is done. Nowadays, firewall and intrusion detection systems are not as reliable, but they are getting better at a given level of threat. Many organizations are using general purpose security tools without knowing that what type of tool could be better for their organization’s data need. It reveals many unnecessary services that work as a gateway for the information leakage. These types of general purpose security tools are highly adopted by small businesses and have created a higher risk towards information security.
Cryptographic techniques
Cryptographic methods remain the most obvious tool for information security. The cryptographic processing is getting faster as hardware technology is advancing. This made cryptographic techniques easier implement on different devices. But, the major flaw is that we are following improper and insecure cryptographic approach that involves small keys. That is easily breakable. Lack of cryptographic advancement is making the future of information insecure; businesses are needed to consider the utilization of maximum hardware capabilities to generate cryptographic keys so that it can make a promising secure communication.
Learning Systems and Neural Net Computing
The upcoming information systems consist of artificial intelligence and are required to perform tasks independently as much as possible. The future of information systems depends on learning from experience and are developed using artificial intelligence. If they use traditional AI, there are a lot of chances that it will create a hurdle for other strategies to implement. Future technologies may use some advanced architecture and hardware that are not supposed to work effectively as desired due to old intelligence strategies. So, the future of information can only service with some advanced artificial intelligence and neural networks to make the most of it to secure the information. Today, computers process information using a tight algorithmic logic from a carefully controlled set of inputs. But, tomorrow it will get more complex and sensitive. Tomorrow’s information systems are likely to make more judgments than today’s systems do. However, the security lack we are doing today is creating hurdles for the systems to be implemented in future. That is somehow making information process insecure. It is essential to note that anticipates about information security are predictably forecasts about information systems themselves. A huge part of what makes information systems open to attack is that they restrain bugs, often referred to as undocumented features. We should not neglect the fact that as much as technology is evolving, our information is getting more at risk due to inappropriate and insecure programming, buggy systems and incapable of supporting advanced integration with other security systems. We should work upon it to reduce future security concerns to protect our information systems as much as possible.
