HANDD Business Solutions (HANDD), an independent specialist in global data security today shared six predictions on how it expects the world of technology, with a particular focus on information security, to evolve in 2018.

1. Artificial Intelligence

2018 will be the year that Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes of age in cybersecurity terms. AI will grow in every area. The detection of insider threat is becoming artificially intelligent by monitoring the way in which people communicate and the growth in demand for an automated AI approach will continue. In 2017, we saw the likes of Wannacry create havoc across almost every market sector and we will see the emergence and fast adoption of what can best be described as the next generation of anti-virus software that will use AI to learn how a virus works on your network and deal with it accordingly.

2. Open collaboration

Vendor/solution collaboration will grow. We will see more vendors opening up their technology to allow cross collaboration across technologies. Example being off the back of GDPR, a lot of organisations are taking the same approach to the challenge of understanding their legacy data in order to comply with GDPR. Using discovery tools such as Varonis to understand who has access, what the data is, where the data is and then following up with classifying the most sensitive content we are seeing Discovery and Classification coming together.  Closer collaboration with organisations such as Varonis and Boldon James. Another example being that Titus have actually developed their own data discovery/governance solution.

3. Increased trust in cloud and MSS

Customers are beginning to increase their trust in the cloud and third-party specialists and this will grow further in 2018. With the threat of cybercrime growing on a daily basis customers recognise the need to outsource security and there will be a growing number putting more their business out to managed service providers because they simply to don’t have the bandwidth or capability to manage it themselves.

4. Women in cybersecurity

One of the reasons for shortage of resources in cybersecurity is down to the lack of females working in the industry. Women have historically turned away from what has been seen as an extremely male dominated industry. It is estimated that just 11% of the total cybersecurity workforce is made up by women. There has however been an increase in the number of women holding senior C-level positions in Cyber Security

These women will influence more women over the coming year and beyond to turn to cybersecurity. Along with some active initiatives in the sector there should be a huge increase in the number of women in Cybersecurity roles in 2018.  Female focused initiatives will help see the industry turn to more women to fill the knowledge/skill shortages.

At UK universities, there are initiatives to increase the number of women taking up STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) with the aim of encouraging a future generation of females to opt to take up careers in cybersecurity in what is traditionally a male dominated industry.

5. Focus on the people problem.

There are currently around three billion people who can get online in the world. By 2020 this figure is expected to be closer to six billion.  This brings with it the problem of people, security awareness and consciousness.  The need for further education to reach a wider set of people will become prevalent.  Security will become more focused on the growing threat of people and the need to manage them better. Simply using a password for authentication will become a thing of the past, multi-factor authentication will prevail as a result. The need for passwords, certificates and other forms of authentication will grow to control identities and access.

There will be continued focus (GDPR playing its part) on security solutions focusing on the ongoing monitoring of user behaviour.

6. Nation states and cyber terrorism

We have already seen evidence of nation states deploying hacking techniques to influence the outcome of democratic elections. This will continue around the world over 2018. It will lead to tighter political sanctions and possible threats of real war. Cyber-attacks will continue to feature as a genuine alternative to physical war aimed at bringing down global economies.

With what seems like the physical threat of the ISIS army being all but eliminated there could be a switch towards more underground cyber focused terrorism techniques with serious consequences for human life.  With the recent hacks on hospitals and other public services it has proven to be a serious and real threat to individuals.  This trend could grow as the individual doesn’t have the budget to protect themselves like global enterprises do.

Attacks on utilities and other infrastructure such as transport services will increase with the aim of causing as much disruption as possible.