A look back at three of the biggest cyber security trends of 2019, and how a new approach to incident response and threat containment can help address them all.
Wow, that was a fast year. We’re currently in the process of looking ahead to new cybersecurity predictions for 2020, but wanted to briefly summarize some of the trends that we all experienced this year.
At this time last year, we posted a blog, which focused on our top predictions for 2019. This article highlighted four major cyber security trends worth watching. It turns out that while they were all big news in cybersecurity this year, three of them were key areas of focus for ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions. These three trends were: “new compliance challenges,” “today’s threat tools need some help,” and “the ever-expanding threat surface.”
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at each of these cyber security trends, and, in the spirit of a “little extra,” we’ll highlight a fourth trend as well to show why we all need a new approach (and how ARIA Cybersecurity can deliver). Enjoy!
Cyber Security Trend #1: Data Privacy and Compliance Pressure Led to Increased Scrutiny and Challenges
We’ve seen so many high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches recently. Yet in 2019, we started seeing the outcomes, penalties, and consequences of all of these breaches.
For example, this year, Wendy’s admitted that its customers were victims of fraudulent charges that were traced back to its restaurants and found to be the result of a malware attack against the company’s POS systems. Unfortunately, this led to a $53M fine for Wendy’s as well as two lawsuits.
As bad as these consequences were, this was an early sign that the FTC would be expanding its investigations into breach governance. Gulp.
Then the plot thickened this summer, when Moody’s put a new spin on the business impact of cybersecurity. In this example, Moody’s downgraded Equifax based on the business impact stemming from the company’s 2017 breach. The official downgrade reduced Equifax’s rating from stable to negative—yet this may be just the first domino to fall now that Moody’s is actively building cyber-risk into its credit ratings.
Understandably, all of this led many companies to rethink their approaches to cybersecurity and compliance, especially as regulations become increasingly difficult to comply with. To help, we wrote a blog article highlighting how ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions align with this new way of thinking.
In it, we showed how the ARIA SDS solution can improve the threat detection and containment capabilities of existing security tools, such as SIEMs, IDS/IPS systems, and SOARs by providing better visibility into all network, especially east-west traffic. This is a topic we’re especially committed to and will continue to focus on in 2020.
For even more information on compliance and how ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions can help you comply with even the most stringent regulations.
Cyber Security Trend #2: The Traditional Security Stack is good but a little help doesn’t hurt
We believe that traditional cyber security tools and platforms all play an important role, but unfortunately none of them can serve as a standalone, “complete” security tool.
For example, intrusion detection systems will continue to be a critical component in any enterprise network security environment, yet they still offer limitations related to too many false positive alerts, limited visibility, and delays in response.
Additionally, security information and event management (SIEM) software still have areas where performance and value could be improved. This is true because SIEMs’ success depends on the data they ingest:
- Ingesting too much data increases operating costs and leads to a high number of false positives.
- Yet if SIEMs don’t receive the right amount of data, it’s almost certain threats will be missed.
Clearly, the industry needs a new approach, similar to what our ARIA SDS solutions are capable of delivering. For example, we connected the dots on the issues with existing security tools and showed how ARIA SDS can help security teams improve the effectiveness of their existing security tools. By making these tools better, companies can get real-time notification of potential intrusions, gather the evidence needed to prove compliance, and accelerate their overall incident response efforts.
Interested in learning more? Download our tech brief, “Five Game-Changing Enhancements for Splunk ES,” now.
Cyber Security Trend #3: The Ever-Expanding Threat Surface
The explosion of IoT devices (including commercial IoT, IIoT, and IoMT), combined with the proliferation of public cloud, containers and VMs has led to a general lack of visibility into east-west traffic, has significantly increased the overall threat surface and companies’ vulnerabilities.
When it comes to IoT, traditional security tools and approaches, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) applications can’t be deployed on IoT devices. This is true because they are usually limited by processing power or memory, or they may be completely closed by the vendor.
Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to monitor internal networks, a challenge considering their mix of of on-premises networks, public clouds, or hosted data centers. Making things more challenging is the fact that there’s extra consideration required to monitor new intra-VM-to-VM and container connections that create high volumes of lateral east-west flows as well as data flows that travel in and out through firewalls to the Internet.
So, getting a handle on all the east-west traffic patterns to understand what’s happening inside a hybrid and expansive internal network has become a difficult, and unfortunately, an often overlooked challenge to solve.
Cyber Security Trend #4: We Need a New Approach to Cyber-Security
This is a topic we truly believe in and will continue to write about in 2020.
We did already touch on this idea though, with an article that showed how ARIA SDS can not only accelerate security incident response and protect critical assets, but improve the performance of existing security tools.
For example, ARIA SDS now delivers a better way to speed up incident response and automatically stop cyber-attacks, especially those that could lead to a devastating data breach. ARIA SDS is a simple-to-deploy solution that enables existing security solutions to work better while saving valuable time, effort, and money.
In this way, our threat containment system combines the best elements of a packet broker, packet recorder, data breach service, and microsegmentation platform to form a flexible but powerful means to accelerate incident response processes and stop attacks typically missed early in the kill chain.
This is a critical advantage, especially when you consider that 60% of enterprise information security budgets will be allocated to rapid detection and response in 2020.
To a More Secure Year Ahead
We hope this look back at 2019 cyber security trends helped see the larger trends and, hopefully, prepare your organization for the road ahead in 2020. Stay tuned even more blog articles next year that will continue to examine new and emerging security trends we should all focus on.
As we conclude, we’d like to thank all our ARIA Cybersecurity customers, community, and everyone who supported us this year. We couldn’t have done it without you, and look forward to continuing to collaborate with you! Happy holidays!
About ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions
ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions recognizes that better, stronger, more effective cybersecurity starts with a smarter approach. Our solutions provide new ways to monitor all internal network traffic, while capturing and feeding the right data to existing security tools to improve threat detection and surgically disrupt intrusions. Customers in a range of industries rely on our solutions each and every day to accelerate incident response, automate data breach detection, and protect their most critical assets and applications. With a proven track record supporting the Department of Defense and many intelligence agencies in their war on terror, and an award-winning portfolio of security solutions, ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions is committed to leading the way in cybersecurity success.