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10 with A10: 10 Security Predictions for 2017

Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Director, MENA at A10 Networks

The cyber landscape changes dramatically year after year. If you blink, you may miss
something; whether that’s a noteworthy hack, a new attack vector or new solutions to protect
your business. Sound cyber security means trying to stay one step ahead of threat actors.

In the spirit of looking toward the future, I wanted to grab my crystal ball and take my best guess
at what will be the big story lines in cyber security in 2017.

1. IoT continues to pose a major threat. In late 2016, all eyes were on IoT-borne attacks.
Threat actors were using Internet of Things devices to build botnets to launch massive
distrubted denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In two instances, these botnets collected unsecured
“smart” cameras. As IoT devices proliferate, and everything has a Web connection —
refrigerators, medical devices, cameras, cars, tires, you name it — this problem will continue to
grow unless proper precautions like two-factor authentication, strong password protection and
others are taken.Device manufactures must also change behaviour. They must scrap default
passwords and either assign unique credentials to each device or apply modern password
configuration techinques for the end user during setup.

2. DDoS attacks get even bigger. We recently saw some of the largest DDoS attacks on
record, in some instances topping 1 Tbps. That’s absolutely massive, and it shows no sign of
slowing. Through 2015, the largest attacks on record were in the 65 Gbps range.

Going into 2017, we can expect to see DDoS attacks grow in size, further fueling the need for
solutions tailored to protect against and mitigate these colossal attacks.

3. Predictive analytics gains ground. Math, machine learning and artificial intelligence will be
baked more into security solutions. Security solutions will learn from the past, and essentially
predict attack vectors and behvior based on that historical data. This means security solutions
will be able to more accurately and intelligently identify and predict attacks by using event data
and marrying it to real-world attacks.

4. Attack attempts on industrial control systems. Similar to the IoT attacks, it’s only due time
until we see major industrial control system (ICS) attacks. Attacks on ecommerce stores, social
media platforms and others have become so commonplace that we’ve almost grown cold to
them. Bad guys will move onto bigger targets: dams, water treatment facilities and other critical
systems to gain recognition.

5. Upstream providers become targets. The DDoS attack launched against DNS provider
Dyn, which resulted in knocking out many major sites that use Dyn for DNS services, made
headlines because it highlighted what can happen when threat actors target a service provider
7 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine December 2016 Edition
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