Emerging Cybersecurity Threats that Need Immediate Attention

Cybersecurity is maturing into a more aggressive state every year as cybercriminals execute new assaults, and exploit newer vulnerabilities continually; while regulatory institutions change and improve standards. Some of the cybersecurity challenges that need to be on every organization's mind throughout the rest of 2018 are—GDPR, Cloud security issues, attacks based on Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and against cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), executed on May 25, 2018, covers the protection of personal data of EU citizens. Its implementation affects every company that processes data from EU customers or businesses or has an office in one of the EU countries. However, regulators will not require international auditing companies for GDPR compliance. Furthermore, if there is any grievance or complaint from an EU citizen or a breach, the firm will have to pay a substantial penalty. This penalty can go up to €20 million (around $24.5 million) in fine or 4 percent of the company’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater.

AI and ML software can “learn and evolve” from the consequences of past events to reach the set goal. While current cybersecurity professionals are utilizing AI/ML tools for countering cyber attacks, there is always a chance that hackers will also implement these innovative solutions for performing attacks that are comparatively advanced than the security implemented by an organization. AI and ML software can be applied for executing complex attacks like sending vast amounts of spam, fraud, phishing messages via chatbots to AI-powered password guessing to performing cryptographic attacks.

Again, with cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems, there are three main types of attacks that need to be dealt with—Eclipse Attack, Sybil Attack, and the DDoS attacks. Even though popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have DDoS protection built-in, it is still a very high risk when it comes to unprotected cryptocurrencies.

The above problems are not the only cybersecurity problems that businesses will face in the near future. However, these are some of the threats which will continue to rise, and become more complex, having the most significant effect on both enterprises, and end users.