2015 Cyber Security Threats

Date posted: 6th October 2015

There has been a significant increase of late in  cyber attacks. In fact, the FBI now ranks cyber crime as one of its top law enforcement activities. In the recent budget proposed by President Obama, he said that he would drastically raise the United States’ spending on cyber security to $15 billion annually. From fraud and identity theft to commercial hacking assaults, cyber security has never been so important for governments, businesses and other organizations.

Hacking experts throughout the world have warned that there are more security threats in the near future, as web identity thieves are gradually getting more and more sophisticated with their tactics while investment and protection stay behind. While some of the conventional cybercrimes like internet password fraud will be prevalent in 2015, there will be more espionage attacks on a larger scale and the Internet of Things will even be considered as a huge risk. Learn more about some of the threats you should watch out for in 2015.

Cyber Espionage:

No matter how tight-lipped the governments may be about their involvement in different activities to fight against their cyber enemies, cyber espionage is gradually becoming the strongest weapon for most of the national governments. The long term players will gradually become better gatherers of information and newcomers will only look for ways of stealing money.

The Internet of Things:

Are you aware of the Internet of Things? Well, if answered No, then this is the connection of different devices like cars and home appliances to the Internet. But sadly enough, this will always be the Internet of Vulnerabilities. Founder of Cyber Senate, Jamison Nesbitt echoed the beliefs of the experts who said that the Internet of Things is one of the biggest cyber security risks of 2015. The unique security challenges will come in terms of the total number of devices that are connected at present. The IoT will be embedded into every market from the energy industry to the healthcare industry.

Increase in cyber theft:

Stealing online financial information is not a new thing. Stealing debit or credit card data online has become a profitable business for cyber criminals. However, as there are new methods of paying for goods like mobile payments, there is again a new opportunity for cyber hackers, especially when retailers don’t store confidential data securely. This would require cyber criminals to target the personal cards and that wouldn’t result in huge scale breaches or burglary.

Precarious passwords:

Passwords that are easy-to-crack are going to pose a big risk in 2015. There has always been a risk of weak passwords and this is a known fact but this may still lead to some of the highest-profile attacks like the very recent iCloud attack.

Ransomware:

Ransomware is a specific kind of malware, which when infected, restricts you to access to a computer system. This will become more refined in its targets and methods. Experts predict that the variants of ransomware that hurt the security software that are installed within a computer may particularly target the endpoints which sign up with cloud-based storage solutions like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and many more. On detecting the endpoint, ransomware will exploit the stored personal credentials of the logged-in user and will even infect the cloud storage that is backed up. McAfee has warned that ransomware attackers will try out as many ways possible to shell out ransom payments from their victims.