Trends for Cyber Security in 2013

In year of 2013, will absolutely reinforce the fact that traditional security measures are no longer effective in thwarting advanced cyber attacks. “Organizations and security providers need to evolve toward more proactive real-time defenses that stop advanced threats and data theft.”

Here are the top trends they should be paying attention to.

• Active cyber defence measures-There will be an increased use of active cyber defence measures, especially in Government. For example, organisations under Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack might take offensive measures against the attacker such as automatically shutting down a connection.Active defence takes on another level of sophistication within an IT organisation by dint of the fact that the company will have to have the rigor and structure in place to implement processes that will automatically shut down threats based on pre-defined business rules.Although products to protect against cyber attack have been available for years to automatically block or shut down traffic based on certain characteristics, organisations have been reluctant to use this capability.

• Actionable Intelligence and The Insider Threat Enterprises such as financial services organisations will put greater emphasis on actionable information to help them identify who their attackers are.Expect to see more eCrimes perpetrated by insiders. This will lead to a greater use of behavioural analysis systems that sit on the network learning what is normal behaviour and what are anomalies.The Insider Threat should also prompt more intelligent use of physical access control.

• Cloud-based Botnets — The ability to create vast, virtual computing resources will further convince cyber criminals to look for ways to co-opt cloud-based infrastructure for their own ends. One possible example is for attackers to use stolen credit card information to purchase cloud computing resources and create dangerous clusters of temporary virtual attack systems.

• Search History Poisoning — Cyber criminals will continue to manipulate search engine algorithms and other automated mechanisms that control what information is presented to Internet users. Moving beyond typical search-engine poisoning, researchers believe that manipulating users’ search histories may be a next step in ways that attackers use legitimate resources for illegitimate gains.