Cyber criminals will employ more drones to facilitate cyber attacks in 2017, as predicted by the analysts of Frost & Sullivan in its Asia Pacific Cyber Security practice.
A researcher’s group from iTrust demonstrated the possibility of launching cyber attacks merely using a smartphone and a drone, according to the analysts. iTrust is a Center for Research in Cyber Security at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
The analysts expect that drones will become an easy approach to scan for lax wireless traffic to perform war-driving attacks.
There is also a tendency for the Internet to be brought down for at least one day in a particular country because of Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks, said Frost & Sullivan analysts in a statement.
Recall that such attacks shut down many popular services operating online in 2016.
Expect that cyber attackers most likely will attempt to even more exploit the vulnerability of devices and systems to the next level.
Analysts also predicted that the Internet of Things (IoT) devices will have greater enforcement to ensure that they meet cyber security standards.
It will be deemed illegal for manufacturers of unsecured IoT devices to sell such products in countries that strictly demand compliance with security standards, as authorities become all the more concerned of their threats to the community.
Meanwhile, the healthcare sector will undergo more stringent regulations to ensure the uptime and security of computer systems that handle critical operations.
In 2016, ransomware attacks infected the computer systems of healthcare providers, thereby disrupting their operations and diverting emergency patients to other hospitals.
Most of healthcare providers in the Asian region took initiatives for security standards compliance, however, they could not keep up with the new types of cyber attacks. Their usage of legacy security tools in order to reach the minimal compliance standards prevents them from doing so.
Stolen personal healthcare records than credit card information have more worth these days in the dark world of the web, the analysts also pointed out.
Medical machines gradually being connected to the Internet also pose a potential safety risk to healthcare patients.
Those said, healthcare providers and the industry in general will need a reliable “cyber health check” before cyber criminals find further vulnerabilities in their system.
Seen to be the leading potential threat in Asia is the Business Email Compromise (BEC), which usually happens to compromised email accounts of chief executives.
Investigations by police authorities disclosed that such scams normally engage businesses or companies that have dealings overseas and with email as the primary form of communication between parties.
For instance, around S$19 million disappeared through BECs in Singapore alone between the months of January and September last year.
Enterprise security teams usually adopt the “wait and see” posture and construct their defenses in mitigating potential threats they know of. But these days, many enterprises work towards getting to know what cyber attackers try to innovate as to their techniques, next moves, before shaping their defenses against new vectors.
Frost & Sullivan analysts emphasized the importance of ensuring that the defenses of enterprises are reliable and strong in 2017. Moreover, organizations should be cyber security ready to avert similar attacks seen in the past year, such as the Bangladesh Central Bank’s case of cyber heist, Yahoo’s massive data leaks, and cyber attack on the Philippines’ Commission on Elections, among others.
