Will Emerging Threats Tip the Scales?

By Fortinet | January 14, 2019

This is a summary of an article that first appeared in SecurityWeek on December 07, 2018.

Digital devices and infrastructures continue to be woven deeper into every aspect of our lives, whether through connected homes, cars, and mobile devices, or by expanding their role in business, government, and even critical infrastructure. One outcome of this is that the stakes in the ongoing battle between cybercriminals and security professionals continues to rise. We are no longer just looking at a cyber breach impacting an organization’s reputation and bottom line. Now and into the future, there is a real potential for a successful cyberattack to disrupt interconnected economies, shut down essential services, or even result in physical harm.

Emerging threats will tip the scales

The classic problem is that the playing field is dramatically uneven. Cybercriminals only need to find a single weakness in a security strategy to achieve their goals, while defenders have to stop 100% of threats 100% of the time. And because attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, often attack multiple threat vectors simultaneously, the imbalance between these adversaries continues to grow.

Last fall, Fortinet predicted a number of emerging threats that may be game changers if we don’t change our tactics. They include such things a Swarmbots—semi-autonomous botnets comprised of clusters of compromised devices with specialized skillsets that can work collectively to solve problems, the commoditization of fuzzing—a process for discovering zero-day vulnerabilities in hardware and software interfaces and applications, and machine learning poisoning—training automated security devices to intentionally overlook certain threats

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