From the first CEO of a major corporation resigning in the wake of a cyber attack, to NATO incorporating the cyber realm into Article 5, to the still fresh-in-our-minds Sony attack, 2014 was certainly a year to remember in cyber security. As we begin another year, here’s what some of us at Endgame predict, anticipate, or hope 2015 will bring for cyber:
Lyndon Brown, Enterprise Product Manager
In 2014, security teams were blind to most of the activity that happened within their networks and on their devices. While the majority of this activity was benign, security breaches and other malicious activity went unnoticed. These incidents often exposed corporate data and disrupted business operations.
2015 is the year that CISOs must decide that this reality is unsustainable. Motivated, in part, by high-profile breaches, security heads will adjust their strategy and manifest this shift in their 2015 budgets. On average, CISOs will increasingly fund threat detection and incidence response initiatives. As the top security executive of a leading technology company poignantly stated, “we’ve finally accepted that any of our systems are or can be compromised”.
Since security budgeting is usually a zero-sum game, spending on preventive controls (such as anti-virus products) will stay stagnant or decline. As security buyers evaluate new products, they will prioritize solutions that leverage context and analysis to make advanced security judgments, and that see all security-relevant behavior – not just what is available in logs.
Rich Seymour, Senior Data Scientist @rseymour
The world of computer security will no doubt see some harrowing attacks this year, but I remain more hopeful than in years past. Burgeoning work in electronic communication—secure, encrypted, pseudo-anonymized and otherwise (like Pond, ssh-chat, bitmessage, DIME, etc)—won’t likely move into the mainstream in 2015, but it’s always neat to see which projects gain traction. The slowly paced rollout of sorely needed secure open voting systems will continue, which is awesome, and includes California’s SB360 allowing certification of open source voting systems, LA County’s work in revamping its election experience, Virginia’s online voter registration, and the OSET foundation’s work, just to name a few.
I hope that this year’s inevitable front-page security SNAFUs will lead more people to temper their early adoption with a measure of humorous cynicism. Far on the other side of the innovation adoption graph, let’s hope that those same security SNAFUs lead the behemoth tech laggards to pull the plug on dubious legacy systems and begin a blunt examination of their infrastructural vulnerabilities. As a data scientist at Endgame, I don’t want to make any predictions in that domain, lest I get thrown to the wolves on twitter for incorrectly predicting that 2015 will be the year a convolutional deep learning network will pre-attribute an attack before the first datagram hits the wire. Let’s not kid ourselves—that’s not happening until 2016 at the earliest.
Jason Rodzik, Director of CNO Software Engineering
In 2015, I expect to see companies—and maybe even the public as a whole—taking computer security much more seriously than they have previously. 2014 ended with not only a number of high-profile breaches, but also unprecedented fallout from those breaches, including the replacement of a major corporation’s (Target’s) CEO and CIO, increased interest in holding companies legally responsible if they fail to secure their systems, and most drastically, a chilling effect on artistic expression and speech (in addition to the large financial damages) with the reactions resulting from the Sony hack. Historically, it’s been hard for anyone looking at financial projections to justify spending money on a security department when it doesn’t generate revenue, but the cost associated with poor security is growing to the point where more organizations will have to be much more proactive in strengthening their security posture.
Douglas Raymond, Vice President
One area where cybersecurity products will change in 2015 is in the application of modern design principles to the user interfaces. There’s a shortage of skilled operators everywhere in the industry, and there isn’t enough time or resources to train them. Companies must solve their challenges with small staffs that have a diversity of responsibilities and not enough time to learn how to integrate a multitude of products. The cost of cognitive overload is high. Examples such as the shooting down of ML17 over Ukraine, the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and the Target data breach, to cite a well known cybersecurity example, demonstrate the real costs of presenting operators with too much information in a poorly designed interface. Data science isn’t enough—cyber companies in 2015 will synthesize data and control interfaces to provide operators with only the most critical information they need to solve the immediate security challenge.
Andrea Little Limbago, Principal Social Scientist @limbagoa
This year will be characterized by the competing trends of diversity and stagnation. The diversity of actors, targets, activities, and objectives in cyberspace will continue to well outpace the persistent dearth of a strategic understanding of the causes and repercussions of computer network operations. A growing number of state and non-state actors will seek creative means to use information technology to achieve their objectives. These will range from nation-state sponsored cyber attacks that may result in physical damage on the one extreme, to the use of cyber statecraft to advance political protest and social movements (e.g. potentially a non-intuitive employment on DDoS attacks) and give a voice to those censored by their own governments on the other. Furthermore, there will be greater diversity in the actors involved in international computer network operations. With the transition away from resources and population to knowledge-based capabilities within cyberspace, there will be a “rise of the rest” similar to economic forecasts of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa) a decade and a half ago. Just like those forecasts, some of the rising actors will succeed, and some will falter. In fact, the BRIC countries will be key 2015 cyber actors, simultaneously using computer network operations internally to achieve domestic objectives, and externally to further geopolitical objectives. Additionally, those actors new to the cyber domain – from rising states to multinational corporations to nongovernment organizations – may subsequently expose themselves to retaliation for which they are ill prepared.
However, despite this diversity, we’ll continue to witness the juxtaposition of theoretical models from previous areas onto the cyber domain. From a Cold War framework to the last decade’s counter-terrorism models, many will attempt to simplify the complexities of cyberspace by merely placing it in the context of previous doctrine and theory. This “square peg in a round hole” problem will continue to plague the public and private sectors, and hinder the appropriate institutional changes required for the modern cyber landscape. Most actors will continue to respond reactively instead of proactively, with little understanding of the strategic repercussions of the various aspects of tactical computer network operations.
Graphic credit: Anne Harper