2019 cyber security predictions

As the year is coming to an end, our in-house Security Experts gaze into their crystal ball and predict what may lie ahead on the threat landscape and cybersecurity industry next year.

Technology and hacking trends, Martin Jartelius, CSO

1. As GDPR continues to gain momentum, we will see a perceived rise in the number of reported breaches. However, we will be uncertain if this should be attributed to an increase breach disclosure or an increase in actual breaches. The only thing for sure is that breaches against personal data have become financially more attractive.
2. Everyone will need a security expert. Everyone will need a team of application security specialists. But they can’t have them because “the market” is drained and companies will continue to struggle with finding skilled security staff. This gives rise to the proliferation of MSSPs and consultancies, but also a shift to focus on usability and decision support in security technology, enabling non-security experts to make educated decisions with insights provided by their supporting systems.
3. Organizations will keep talking about 'defense in depth' but keep building a hard wall around their perimeter and leaving a very soft network inside.
4. As technical security measures continue to make it harder to breach, phishing will continue to rise, and organizations will blame user responsibility for insecurity and gullibility as the problem, even though it's down to not hardening workstations and internal networks.
5. We will see an increased focus on supply chain breaches in web applications due to the substantial success of those attacks in 2018. These attacks differ from normal supply chain attacks as instead of targeting code in the manufacturing line, as components are loaded cross domain and across organizations, the website security or large organizations will be broken based on their dependency on small organization.

Cloud security trends, Sergio Loureiro, Director Cloud Solutions

1. AWS, Azure and Google will continue the push towards cloud security. After the Azure Security Center, the GCP command center and a lot of security tools from AWS, we will continue to see more security assistance tools from the cloud providers. Hybrid infrastructures and multi-cloud will remain a challenge for cloud tools.
2. Infrastructure as code adoption will skyrocket and security as code will appear. Security is a part of infrastructure definition and the push for full automation needs security to be included. This is related to immutable infrastructure and software defined security trends.
3. Containers and serverless adoption will make security shift left. Relying more and more on cloud providers for infrastructure services and adopting microservices and ephemeral serverless functions, the focus will be on application security and how to integrate security into DevOps CI/CD.
4. Cloud data leaks will continue to grow, in a large scale. After the basic S3 buckets were left open to the public with confidential data, we will see more data lake leaks as many enterprises are migrating to the cloud. Misconfigurations on databases, Elastic Search Clusters or Hadoop Clusters will expose big data.

Application security trends, Simon Roe, Product Manager

1. DevOps adoption rates will continue to grow in mid and large enterprise organisations forcing a change in the mindset of the traditional security teams. More security ‘experts’ will be moved into the DevOps project teams, resulting in a significant increase in a DevSecOps mindset across these enterprises.
2. There will also be wider adoption of DevOps results in organizations realizing that security is the responsibility of everyone involved in the CI/CD process and not just the IT security team. This will result in a bigger uptake of tools and processes that better support this transformation. Traditional application security tools will have to evolve to better suit the CI/CD process through a tight seamless integration.
3. Despite the change in security practises brought about by more widespread adoption of DevSecOps, there will be an increase in the number of large breaches resulting directly from the reuse of 3rd party or open source software libraries. Organizations will continue to struggle with this through 2019 partly due to the shorter development times the customer markets demand.