It’s estimated that Ransomware costs will climb to roughly $11.5 billion in 2019, according to CSO Online. The frequency of attacks continues to increase as well. According to a report on Ransomware, these attacks occurred once every 120 seconds in early 2016. By 2017 this spiked to an attack occurring every 40 seconds. In 2019, the frequency is expected to grow to an attack happening every 14 seconds.
At a point in time, smart devices and robotics were common elements in the storyline of futuristic fictional novels. Today, those concepts are the modern norm across the technology industry. Similarly, in cybersecurity, pioneering professionals held on to seemingly far-fetched dreams where logs were easy to analyze, and false positives didn’t exist. While these challenges still exist, artificial intelligence (AI) is making these once far-fetched dreams the new norm in the security industry.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is used all around us and if you’ve used some sort of voice activated technology to make your life easier, then there was likely some element of AI involved. Some of the most notable examples include Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Tesla semi-autonomous vehicles. Individual consumers no longer have to fumble around in the dark to flip the light switch at home, manually search playlists for songs, or type in a password to get into smartphones.
Over the last century, our technology devices have gone from being clunky systems that require tons of human interaction, to modern machines that seem to have a mind of their own. Our phones can do things like autocomplete sentences before we finish typing, suggest purchases based on sites we’ve visited in the past, and even predict our schedules on any given day based on our prior habits. This is all possible due to the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Gone are the days when our greatest inklings of insider threats were employees who never wanted to take vacation and did everything to avoid letting others see the financial records they were maintaining. Today, insider threats come in a concerning variety of forms with consequences often exceeding millions of dollars. As time passes, more industries than ever before are feeling the sting of security incidents and breaches stemming from their very own trusted employees and partners.
Ponemon’s 2019 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report highlights how inappropriate use of privileged password can give insiders the access they need. Ultimately, the malicious insider needs one thing to perform an act that hurts the organization – access.
