This year has been a tough one for cybersecurity, especially if you were one of the folks that got
hacked. And even if you weren't, you might have been and you just don't know it yet. That happens.
So let's take a look at what kinds of things have we seen overall trends in the past year
in cybersecurity. So we'll take a look back and then we'll take a look forward into the future.
What can we look forward to in cybersecurity, threats as well as hopefully good things that can
occur. I think there will be a mixture of good news and bad news with both. So first of all,
looking back, one of the things that continues to plague us is this notion of data breach.
That is the bad guys get into your system, they dump your customer database, they use it to mine
for information that they can later use identity fraud scenarios with. They steal the secret sauce,
the plans, this sort of stuff, and the business is compromised as a result.
The IBM - Ponemon survey that we run each year on the cost of a data breach shows that the cost
of a data breach continues to be in excess of $4 million per incident. That has been
the case for a number of years and it continues to be the case. We've got to do a better job on
this. It's almost become so commonplace that we're numb to it. And that can't be the case.
What's the cause of a lot of these data breaches? Well, it turns out ransomware
is that the core of many of them, not all, but many. And ransomware is costing people,
individuals, all the way up to the large organizations and even nation states. As its
effect is resulting in data loss, it's resulting in extortion. A lot of bad things happen here. So
those are a couple of bad trends that we see. How about something good, a little bit of good news
for last year? I'll say multi-factor authentication is one. It's not a new idea, but the idea that I
can authenticate, prove my identity to the system based upon something I know, something I have,
and something I am. Those three things put all of those together or some combination. Maybe even get
rid of the something. I know the password. It's a better user experience and it can lead to better
security. And what we've seen is more and more widespread adoption of multi-factor authentication.
That's going to be a good thing for us all. And we've seen that start to take more hold in the
past year. Now, how about looking forward? What kind of things have can we expect to see? Well,
I'm going to say it's going to be a little bit of Groundhog Day. What we've seen in the past,
we're going to keep seeing in the future until we learn how to solve these problems. Data breach,
ransomware, multi-factor authentication. Hopefully, we'll continue to see more and more widespread
use of that. So the past continues to play into the future and influence the future,
but what are some other things that we'll see? I think we're going to see a rise in attacks for
Internet of Things. Internet of Things, or IoT, is basically the notion, if you follow along with me,
turn everything into a computer-- your car becomes a computer that takes you places.
Your refrigerator is a computer. It keeps your food cold. Your DVR is a computer that shows you
movies. And in the IoT trend, everything becomes a computer. And what we know from cybersecurity
is that every computer can be hacked. So if everything can be a computer and every computer
can be hacked, all of a sudden everything can be hacked. Your car, your refrigerator,
your insulin pump, your implantable defibrillator. These are things that are going to be pretty scary
when we start thinking about the whole world around us is potentially hackable. That's an
area that we have got to give more attention to. Another one that could come back to haunt us is
the use of artificial intelligence by the bad guys. On the positive side, we've had the good
guys using AI for some number of years. We can use this to do a better job of security analysis,
of root cause analysis, looking for what all of these indicators of compromise ultimately mean,
and figuring out what we need to do. The good guys are using this to analyze and investigate. The bad
guys, I think are going to start using it more and more to do things like develop attacks that are
specific to an AI. An artificial intelligence system would be able to maybe design new types
of attacks to get into systems. We could also, as our businesses become more and more dependent upon
artificial intelligence, we are dependent upon the corpus of knowledge that's in those systems.
So therefore, if someone were able to poison the corpus of knowledge, then the AI would be
giving advice and making decisions based on bad information. So that's a different type
of AI-based attack. All of these go into what we refer to as adversarial AI. So there are a
number of things that the bad guys could be doing where they're going to start using AI more,
which just means the good guys are going to have to start using our AI more still. And another
one that is very new and will continue to grow is the notion of a deepfake. That is an audio
or video file where we have a a person, maybe a well-known person saying something that they
never said. And we tend to believe what we see. And if it goes out on social media, everyone will
believe it before anyone has a chance to refute it. Imagine what happens if a video is leaked on
Election Day showing a candidate saying something that they never said that was terrible. It could
be too late before we get the news cycle-- the next news cycle ---to correct the error. It could also
move the stock market. If we had a CEO seeming to say certain information that would look bad about
the company and cause the stock to crash, even though they never said those words, but we have
an AI that can do that sort of simulation. We're going to have to get smarter about how to detect a
deepfake from an authentic video as an example. Other things that we'll see. Quantum computers
are very useful in solving problems that traditional computers have not been able to do.
To do simulations and things of that sort, that we just don't have the computing capacity to
process with a conventional computer. So a quantum system could solve those problems in record time.
Also, a quantum system could potentially attack the cryptography that we have. The asymmetric
crypto algorithms that we rely on every day for all of our secure communications could
potentially be broken in what we thought would have taken decades or hundreds of years. Now, with
a well-tuned quantum system in the future, maybe being able to be broken in a matter of minutes.
So that means we're going to have to do some good work to make quantum-safe algorithms for
cryptography. And the good news is we've got these things. In fact, the National Institute
of Standards recently this year came out with four algorithms that they published as being
quantum-safe. These are the algorithms that will protect against a quantum computer trying to crack
our encrypted messages and databases and the like. And four of those algorithms that were accepted,
of those four, three of them, in fact, had IBM contributions to them. So we're very proud of
our work that we've done in this space in trying to protect people going forward into the future.
And then another trend that has continued for a number of years and it shows no signs of letting
up is a skills gap in cybersecurity. There's one website called cyberseek.org that says, currently,
as I look at the website, there are about 770 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the US
alone. That's right now, and there's only about a million or so people working in the field. So
it's almost 1 to 1 for every job. Now there is an opening and we can't make cybersecurity experts
that quickly. With current technology, we can create a new human in about nine months. But if
we're going to turn them into a cybersecurity expert, it's going to take a few more years.
There's not anything that looks like we can suddenly start minting new cybersecurity experts
to fill the gap. But we can do some things to help. And we can do things by working smarter
using AI that I mentioned here to guide our security efforts, using good tools to automate the
responses that we have for security, to do better analysis and become force multipliers for the
people that we do have. Also, we need to do a lot more training for the people that are out there,
not only our end users, so that they don't put us in such a bad place to begin with,
but also security professionals and create more security professionals. So it's going
to be a multi-pronged approach, but these are the things that I think we're going to be able to see,
both on the positive and the negative as we start looking forward to the future of cybersecurity.