The Future of Cyber Security: What We Can Expect

Battles are moving away from the use of guns and tanks, rather to the use of weaponized cyberattacks to shut down a whole city. A recent example is the Ukrainian cyberattack in 2018 which goes to show how critical cyber warfare is in the contemporary space. Unfortunately, cyber security keeps on being a very reactive activity in the sense that, we have remained in the cat and mouse loop- always proffering quick fix to an already successful attack. Compared with the exponential growth use of cyber threats over the years. Cyber threats poses a great challenge in the nearest future as it is growing side by side with the explosion in the use of internet and poses a question of how ready Tech world is to contain these threats.

With the explosive growth of the internet and the foreseen increase in the use of Internet of Things to over 30 billion as at year 2020 as can be seen in fig 1. 2, a gigantic stack of data would be gathered. The implication is that: The most resilient form of security has to be gotten for the big data.

Indeed, the world is now more aware that cyber threats are genuine and imminent, counter measures are being set up which look to explore the abundant cybersecurity solutions. IT has begun to take the war of security back to our advantage with the so many new innovations such as block chain, which will now be the foundational pieces of upcoming e-government, smart cities, smart IoTs and all other activities carried out in cyber security. Now the community is taking deliberate steps to bring cybersecurity to the forefront of business and all things in the internet space.

Taking all the cyberattacks into consideration, cybersecurity defense systems (CDS) or security information and events management systems (SIEM) will need to become more sophisticated in order to cope with massive data traffic.

The incorporation of artificial intelligence and very fast computing power, into the SIEM systems, analysis of copious amount of data and trends will be easily done in a matter of seconds. Interconnection of SIEM systems of various networks, such that any confirmed breach is sent out to other networks and fixes can be quickly made. Finally, a step in that direction would be to familiarise the old guard with the new cybersecurity standard and train the new guard to comply with the standard.

The implementation of these features would see the SIEM systems smarter, more reliable and scalable. These new systems will have features enabled that will analyse data, identify vulnerabilities, mitigate threats and possibly curb threats all at the same time updating itself and sharing the information with other SIEM systems.

On a personal level, individuals would want to automate parts of our everyday life; this would require IoT connected devices and some virtual assistance using AI. On a national level, governments and large organizations will develop stronger cyber technologies for their network's security. This baby industry will be one of the largest employer for the next 5 to 10 years, as skills are needed to put these many ideas together to form a formidable and resilient internet void of threats.

The nearest future will definitely deliver a system that can cope or adapt to any change or arising problems without collapsing despite.

Conclusion

The possibility that an information system or asset’s weakness can be exploited by a threat has exponentially moved from one percent to a thousand percent. Unfortunately, a network is always vulnerable, thus, no information or asset is safe.

There are always a new threats coming up after another and in a matter of time fixes are built to protect the system from them. This had been the trend of things for a while, until recently, after several series of serious weaponized cyberattacks such as Petya, Notpetya, Wannacry, huge data breaches, occurring in Atlanta, Ukraine, Russia, and even top notch companies like Yahoo, Facebook, to mention a few, the need to be proactive in securing data has become a very critical part of production for both the present and future.

With this awaken, many innovations have been made such as Blockchain, SIEM, AI or Anomaly IDS/IPS and thousand more will still be built to enhance the present. I t is believed that in the future, the internet will be clean and rid of all threats.