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Barracuda Networks: Public Cloud Security Changes and Other 2019 Predictions

Barracuda Networks: Public Cloud Security Changes and Other 2019 Predictions

Barracuda Networks: Public Cloud Security Changes and Other 2019 Predictions

‘Tis the season for 2019 cybersecurity predictions. In SIEM, digital transformation, public cloud security, the cybersecurity staffing, and the interrelation of identity and security analytics dominated the 2018 conversation.

What will 2019 hold for these essential issues in SIEM? To get some perspectives, we spoke with experts from security solution provider Barracuda Networks.

Here are their key predictions from Barracuda Networks, edited slightly for readability:

In 2019, public cloud security will become more automated and attackers will get stealthier

Tim Jefferson, VP, Public Cloud, Barracuda Networks

The public cloud market is maturing, and we expect to see a huge appetite for cloud security in 2019. Businesses aren’t just experimenting with the public cloud anymore, and now that more customers have critical infrastructure and workloads on platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure, they’re realizing they need purpose-built cloud security solutions to help them protect workloads moving to these platforms.

As workload migration accelerates to the public cloud, security risk professionals will need to get more actively involved in their DevOps team’s processes so they can automate the application of governance and compliance controls. It’s not about dictating what tools the team uses, but verifying that controls are being met and helping the builders build securely.

After all, configuration errors can be easy to make as people try to use new cloud services they might not fully understand. That’s why I expect to see more teams embracing automation to continuously monitor cloud security and remediate problems automatically.

Providing these types of automated cloud security controls will be more important than ever in the year ahead because cybercriminals are getting better at finding compromised credentials or access keys and exploiting them.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 80 percent of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials, or insider theft—not cloud provider vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals will also get more clever at using compromised accounts in ways that will be difficult to detect.

Instead of using a massive amount of new resources for cryptomining, which causes a noticeable spike in usage, they’re starting to use already-approved resources and stealing some cycles from those instead, which is easier to hide. I expect to see more attacks like that in 2019.

2019 will be the tipping point for the cyber security skills gap

Michael Flouton, VP, Product Ops and Security Strategy, Barracuda Networks

While it’s long been known that the cybersecurity industry has a significant skills gap problem, what’s lesser known is that this gap is also increasing. In October 2018, (ISC) revealed that the global cyber skills gap now stands at three million, with 63% of businesses lacking the cyber skills to actually keep threats at bay.

The balance between the resources, skills, and expertise of the “good guys” who are fighting attacks and the “bad guys” who are launching the attacks in the first place is a very delicate one.

In 2019, get ready for a skills gap tipping point. As cyber attackers’ tactics become ever more sophisticated and, more importantly, harder to spot, they demand ever more hours of the good guys’ time to identify and stop.

A recent example of a new style attack that takes way more work to detect, investigate, and clean up are the account takeover incidents that we’ve observed. They involve attackers stealing the email credentials of employees and using them to send emails from the user’s real account. Because the attackers cover their tracks—for example by deleting sent emails—often the only way people know they’ve been breached is when they get mysterious out-of-office responses.

Added to this, many organizations are finding it harder and harder to recruit and retain cyber specialists to help them keep the bad guys at bay. Which means they’re relying on fewer people with the skills and expertise needed to protect their organization. These decreasing human resources will come to a head in 2019, where I predict that organizations will stop being able to keep up with investigating these “stealth” cyber attacks.

Account takeovers and email threats will get up close and personal in 2019

Asaf Cidon, VP of Email Security, Barracuda Networks

Account takeover is one of the biggest threat vectors in the cybersecurity industry today. More and more organizations are getting hit, and the attacks are getting more and more targeted. Attackers are moving away from the relatively standard phishing email, as they are finding that strategically targeting business executive accounts is much more lucrative.

In 2019, the level of personalization in these attacks will reach new heights. Specific tactics that are beginning to gain traction include:

  •       An attacker will know when an executive is on a flight and won’t be on email that day, and will choose that time frame to target one of their subordinates by impersonating the executive.
  •       An attacker will know that their target is going to make a big purchase, so they will jump in right before the transaction takes place to redirect the funds or change the order information.

These are just a few examples of how attackers will up the ante by making account takeovers and email attacks so personalized that even the savviest of targets can be fooled.

In that vein, a big problem in cybersecurity that will grow even bigger is that of identity — how do we know if someone is really who they say they are? This challenge will be exacerbated as more organizations continue to move to the cloud and remote logins become more common.

Thanks again to the experts at Barracuda Networks for their time and expertise! 


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