The Year of Cybercrime Ahead

2016 is a couple of weeks old at this point, and we haven’t seen any truly major cybersecurity stories out there thus far. As we have witnessed in years past, that can all change in an instant and at a constant, frenetic pace. Whatever technology exploit or whatever scheme develops next, there is little doubt that cybercrime will be the field to watch. The enterprise has certainly got an eye at the spectrum of threats and it is endlessly putting up a battle to prevent another company seeing the kind of insider and outsider breach that has brought so many companies to the brink.

Adding insight to the issue, the IT auditing software provider Netwrix Corporation indicates what it sees as the main challenges in the world of cybercrime that lie ahead in 2016. The list includes the familiar topics of malware, hacking, unintended disclosure, portable devices, and physical loss of devices. Despite years of work in these fields, these kinds of statistics shift slowly in time as technologies improve, attention shifts, and as better awareness becomes the norm.

The numbers tell the story of an increased threat matrix, with points of presence across the spectrum. They also tell of the efforts to deal with continued breaches and assess the damage inflicted after the fact. There is little doubt that attacks affect the business bottom line, sometimes the costs are due to the expensive cleanup after a breach, or perhaps it is the technology reinvestment that accompanies that period after a breach, or it is a hit to a company’s reputation. There is a lot to deal with.

The name of the game in 2016 will be vigilance. Today, the variety of threats that beset the industry are of a multi-leveled nature. It is becoming increasingly common to see multi-staged attacks on a corporation, staged in succession in order to consume resources, effort, and focus from what is likely a thinly spread security staff. Among the things that have changed going back a year in time, the information reads that hackers have become more focused on high value targets than ever before, reducing the total count of targets, but maximizing the impact on the targets that do get hit.