5 Cybersecurity Trends for 2019

As we kick off 2019, we are excited to bring you our 3^rd Annual “STEALTHbits’ Experts Predictions”. This has been such a crowd pleaser that we just had to keep it going!

Like the last few years, we made our way around the office with left over holiday cookie bribes to get the voice of STEALTHbits regarding the future of cybersecurity. So, read on…because you don’t want to miss these wise and insightful opinions on which trends will emerge in the New Year!

Trend #1 – GDPR fines will make organizations finally get serious.

– Ryan Tully, Vice President of Product Strategy

“GDPR passed in 2016, and went into effect in 2018, however there is no shortage of organizations that are still underprepared. Expect that in 2019 we will see fines levied against those organizations – and for US-based organizations that do business in California or with residents of the state you will have all of 2019 to get ready for the regulation which has many similarities to GDPR. The old wait and see approach to privacy regulations is almost guaranteed to be a losing approach.”

Trend #2 – Organizations will start shifting to data in the Cloud, which will be a significant new attack surface.

 – Rod Simmons, Vice President of Product Strategy

“Cost savings, accessibility, and scalability have many people looking at file Storage in the Cloud as an alternative to traditional file storage. Data storage in the cloud is not hype and first movers can expect to reap the benefits, with some growing pains. I expect for a large portion of use cases the data will go to the cloud and will never come back. There are some benefits to on-premises data and you may see some push back, but the end users will love the cloud storage; the real challenge will be getting them to stop thinking about drive letters.”

Trend #3 –  2019 could be the year we finally ditch the password

– Dan McLaughlin, Pre-Sales Engineer 

“I am really surprised we haven’t already ditched the password.  Organizations already realize how much of an inconvenience passwords can be, as well as a major vulnerability to opening up the doors to a breach. Most of the worry within organizations around passwords today comes from complexity standards and users setting passwords that can easily be cracked. If you pay close attention to all of the compromised passwords out on the web it is no surprise that passwords like “123456789”, “qwerty”, and “p@ssword!@#” are on the top of the list.

It is going to be interesting to see how 2019 shapes the way we authenticate, and I hope it doesn’t take another huge breach for us to realize. Authentication practices like multi-factor authentication, biometric scanning and facial/voice recognition seem to not be as popular as they really should be.” 

Trend #4 – The cloud is dead. Long live the hybrid cloud.

– Farrah Vijayan,  Director of Technical Product Management

“Let’s face it. The cloud is growing, and more rapidly than ever. More and more companies are adopting a cloud based model, with a predicted growth of 17.3% in 2019 for the public cloud services market according to Gartner research https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-09-12-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-grow-17-percent-in-2019.

The reality is though that data privacy and security concerns are not going away especially with the introduction of regulation like the GDPR, and the public cloud isn’t the place quite yet to store sensitive data. Organizations will continue to have compliance and regulatory standards dictate how to secure their data, and will require the level of security that comes with owning and supporting the infrastructure responsible for storing these workloads.

A hybrid cloud approach offers companies the flexibility and scalability that comes with public cloud adoptation along with the visibility and control associated with on premise infrastructure. In 2019 companies will continue to transition towards a hybrid cloud model with the support of vendors like Microsoft who are focusing on improving their hybrid capabilities in their 2019 releases.”

Trend #5 – Machine learning is no longer a buzzword

– Lee Berg, Technical Product Manager

“Machine learning has proven its worth, and organizations are now applying it to solving business problems.

’Machine Learning’, ‘UBA’ – Still Buzzwords?! Well… yes and no. Over the last year, our industry has moved further and further to a maturity point where we can get beyond the buzzwords and actually start getting some real results. Many of the technical hurdles are a thing of the past and there are many great options for organizations to use to protect themselves with UBA and machine learning offerings.

Even though it is now much easier to implement UBA, our industry still has a long way to go until we can really start living up its true promise. As an industry we have become quite good at capturing Abnormal Events, but capturing these events is really only part of the story. Detection of abnormal behavior can help lead us down the road to discovering the REAL threat behind the behavior but only if we can properly contextualize and drill down into the activity to get a true picture of what really happened.

Defining standards as to WHAT a UBA product can and should present to an operator is something that will likely see a great focus on in 2019 that will help take UBA beyond a small set of use cases and into a much more widespread and comprehensive offering for organizations to protect themselves in the constantly changing threat environment we find ourselves in today.”

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