2015 Outlook from McAfee

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE

By Jagdish Mahapatra, MD- India and SAARC, McAfee   Following are the mega trends that will dominate 2015’s security industry in India- 1.       Increased use of cyber warfare and espionage tactics. Cyber espionage attacks will continue to increase in frequency as long-term players will become stealthier information gatherers, while newcomers to cyber-attack capabilities will look for ways to steal sensitive information and disrupt their adversaries.       •         Established nation-state actors will work to enhance their ability to remain hidden on victim systems and networks.       •        Cybercriminals will continue to act more like nation-state cyber espionage actors, focusing on monitoring systems                    and      gathering high-value intelligence on individuals, intellectual property, and operational intelligence.       •        McAfee Labs predicts that more small nation states and terror groups will use cyber warfare. 2.       Greater Internet of Things attack frequency, profitability, and severity. Unless security controls are built-in to their architectures from the beginning, the rush to deploy IoT devices at scale will outpace the priorities of security and privacy. This rush and the increasing value of data gathered, processed, and shared by these devices will draw the first notable IoT paradigm attacks in 2015.     •     The increasing proliferation of IoT devices in environments such as health care could provide malicious parties access to personal data even more valuable than credit card data. For instance, according to the McAfee Labs report entitled Cybercrime Exposed: Cybercrime-as-a-Service, the cybercrime community currently values stolen health credentials at around $10 each, which is about 10 to 20 times the value of a stolen U.S. credit card number.  3.       Privacy debates intensify. Data privacy will continue to be a hot topic as governments and businesses continue to grapple with what is fair and authorized access to inconsistently defined “personal information.”        •     In 2015 we will see continued discussion and lack of clarity around what constitutes “personal information” and to what extent that information may be accessed and shared by state or private actors.        •             We will see a continued evolution in scope and content of data privacy rules and regulations, we may even see laws begin to regulate the use of previously anonymous data sets.       • The European Union, countries in Latin America, as well as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and many others may enact more stringent data privacy laws and regulations. 4.       Ransomware evolves into the cloud. Ransomware will evolve its methods of propagation, encryption, and the targets it seeks. More mobile devices are likely to suffer attacks.       • We predict ransomware variants that manage to evade security software installed on a system will specifically target endpoints that subscribe to cloud-based storage solutions.      • Once the endpoint has been infected, the ransomware will attempt to exploit the logged-on user's stored credentials to also infect backed-up cloud storage data.      • We expect the technique of ransomware targeting cloud-backed-up data to be repeated in the mobile space.     • We expect a continued rise in mobile ransomware using virtual currency as the ransom payment method...See More