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Cloudy With a Chance of IoT attacks: The Cybersecurity Forecast for 2019

By Leigh-Anne Galloway

2018 was a trying year for the cybersecurity industry, with breaches increasing and showing no signs of slowing as we enter the New Year. This is in part, a consequence of easily accessible malware and deployment kits, and the threats aren't going to disappear with the New Year champagne bubbles, and 2019 will bring its own threats with the propagation of new technology — 5G and IoT — and their security vulnerabilities. However, there's also progress on the horizon, thanks to more stringent government regulation and increasing legal action.

The Barrier of Entry for Cyber Criminals Gets Lower

Not even the largest companies, with presumably the greatest resources available, have been able to protect themselves from massive attacks in 2018. In the past few months alone, it has been reported that 500,000 Google+ accounts could have been left exposed thanks to a bug, leading to the ill-fated site promptly being shut down; Facebook confessed that up to 29 million users were affected by its data breach; and Amazon came under sharp criticism for exposing an undisclosed number of customer details shortly before Black Friday. And that's just in the U.S. On the international stage, the world was shocked in October as Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific disclosed that a massive 9.4 million passenger records were lost earlier in the year.

This increase in cyber attacks and the diversification of targets is a consequence of the low barrier to entry for cybercriminals. It is getting cheaper and easier to launch mass attacks, and this barrier is being reduced even further as criminals sell ready-made solutions for attacks. Today, the cyber crime market is so sophisticated that some malware developers even provide "technical support" and universal Trojans appearing on the shadow market can be used for everything from espionage and data theft to remote device management. And still, the demand for malware development and distribution significantly exceeds the supply.

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