2016 wasn’t a pretty great year if we access the overall cyber security scenario. The hackers have found new ways to deploy mammoth DDoS attacks by creating armies of IoT devices. In October, we witnessed Dyn DDoS attack that took down about half of the global internet.
One of the prophecies for 2017 that may have a bigger impact on the finance and broker sector, was made on last December by the US technology security vendor LogRhythm, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, is a company specialising in security information and event management (SIEM) software that has a global presence. According to the company’s chief information security officer and vice president James Carder, the whole internet will shut down for 24 hours.
“In 2017, we’re going to see it hit big sometime, somewhere. If the internet goes down, financial markets will tank,” he said.
The security expert told Business Insider that all the signs were there this year:
“We saw the massive [distributed denial of service] against DynDNS just a couple of months ago. That DDoS attack took down sites like Twitter and Spotify for a few hours. We saw a similar DDoS hit Brian Krebs before the attack against Dyn. These were really just tests. If you can prove that you can take down massive sites and a large chunk of the US internet for a few hours, a 24-hour outage seems pretty easy to do?”
Furthermore, he added that in 2017 we could witness the following threats:
- Hackers will target and silence major media sites — such as CNN, FOX News, etc. — to influence what is reported and attempt to keep people in the dark.
“There will be more focused IoT botnet attacks, like the largest DDoS attack ever committed (Oct. 2016), which was all done using embedded systems/IoT devices. We’ll see a larger botnet attack, powered by the hundreds of thousands of IoT devices that still have malware running on them”. - Mobile Ransomware will get more personal, since “attackers will use pre-authenticated tokens to disseminate malware. Because so many Apple devices are interconnected, the malware could very quickly spread. Attackers will target consumers and hold their personal data hostage.”
- An uptick in Psychological Operations (PSYOPs), where hackers will use social media platforms to manipulate messages and influence people.
- Countries and regions in modern nations coming up with their own cyber security governance, and starting enforcing compliance with those mandates, as we have initially seen with GPG-13 (Cyber Security Framework) and GDPR (Data Security Framework) in the US.
