10 Security Advances that Could Change the Game

**Editor’s Note: Throughout the fourth quarter of 2018, as part of our “In Focus” series, we will feature a series of galleries designed to help partners grow their businesses in 2019 and beyond.**

The cybersecurity channel has stepped up its game this year while cybercriminals shifted their strategies and mounted even more attacks on businesses of all sizes.

In short, nobody’s too small to be targeted by hackers, and breaches increasingly are coming from both outsiders and insiders.

Ovum’s Rik Turner

So what about the year to come? What do those fighting the war on cybercriminals have up their sleeves?

“There is considerable innovation in security, particularly in what you might term edge security – technology designed to sit on the real or notional edge of a corporate network to keep the bad guys out and the good stuff in – but also in data security; [for example], encryption, key management [and so on],” said Rik Turner, principal analyst at Ovum. “A lot of new developments are coming out of the United States and Israel.”

In essence, the evolving threat landscape is driving the need for cybersecurity innovation as cybercriminals find innovative new ways to mount an attack and exploit vulnerabilities, he said.

Imperva’s Terry Ray

Terry Ray, chief technology officer at Imperva, said the cat-and-mouse game of bad guy versus good guy in cybersecurity is always a rapid back and forth. This naturally requires security-process, product and people growth to meet new demands in the space, he said.

“There are multiple drivers, but I find the broadest across all areas is lack of expertise,” he said. “Businesses are expanding their IT infrastructure well beyond the boundaries of local data centers and individual servers. Now distributed infrastructure, mobile users, cloud-enabled systems, microservices and other business-enablement and scaling technologies are drastically expanding the organizational footprint and at the same time, expanding the field of attack that bad actors can exploit.”

Webroot’s Tyler Moffitt

This means the field that security must cover has expanded as well, yet most security departments don’t get more players to cover more ground, Ray said. It’s always been a “zone coverage model for security, but now more so, with some zones completely ignored in many cases,” he said.

Cybercriminals are very creative and resourceful when discovering new ways to deliver malware to systems, all with the aim of making money, said Tyler Moffitt, senior threat research analyst at Webroot.

“Just this past year, we saw criminals shift their strategy to steal cryptocurrency from you in the form of power through unused CPU,” he said. “They don’t even need to wait for victims to make a decision to pay a bitcoin ransom for data anymore, as they can simply mine cryptocurrency while you browse the web through cryptojacking. Fileless malware distribution is also on the rise like leveraging registry, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and PowerShell scripts to deliver payloads.”

ThreatConnect’s Drew Gidwani

Cybersecurity technology is constantly advancing, with rapid development in solutions that address specific problems, but slow development in leveraging them together in a holistic, comprehensive security posture, said Drew Gidwani, director of analytics at ThreatConnect.

“There isn’t one provider that solves all cybersecurity problems, and those problems are multiplying as we advance as a society,” he said. “It seems like almost weekly we see a newcomer in the security space that addresses a specific cybersecurity problem or other vendors develop new approaches to tackle challenges.”

In the gallery below, numerous cybersecurity professionals provide 10 security advances they say will make a big impact on the cybersecurity war in 2019.