Election Hacking will Lead to New Cybersecurity Focus

January 2, 2017

January 3, 2017

Ernest Worthman

Executive Editor, Applied Wireless Technology

One thing that will certainly be near the center of the radar scope in the coming months is cybersecurity. With all the noise about hacking elections, the Mirai IoT botnet and the Yahoo and Facebook hacks –– count on cybersecurity getting a lot of visibility and traction.

Expect the new regime to focus on threats from nation states, particularly Russia. Expect that, as more devices come on line, and with a jump in IoX-type interconnect especially at the consumer level, more breaches will occur, because many of these devices will not have the required security layers in place.

According to Benjamin Jun, CEO of HVF labs, 2017 will “start seeing smarter firewalls and home routers that can isolate individual devices and “patch-in-place” at the network layer. Network access control will come back into fashion, and even home networks will start to offer local sandboxing capabilities.

On the enterprise scene, this will be the year many enterprises will get just how important cybersecurity is to their organization. Wade Baker of InfoSec noted that “We have started to see increasing momentum up the chain for cybersecurity visibility from the boardroom at large enterprises and within the consumer base. We’ll see this shift continue in 2017, especially if it is coupled with high-profile or large-scale attacks.”

With that we will finally see a shift away from legacy solutions to advanced platforms, such as biometrics, which will also be a more proactive approach by the enterprise in terms of applying machine learning and advanced behavioral analytics in a more preemptive approach.

There are many other vectors in cybersecurity that will gain momentum but space limits what can be discussed.