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What is the Future of Cyber Security?

By Milica Djekic, an Online Marketing Coordinator at Dejan SEO and the Editor-in-Chief at
Australian Science Magazine.
Recently I have been attending the webinar “Insight Into the World of Hacker Economics” by
Security Experts from Juniper Networks & RAND Corporation. The event has provided a lot
of useful information, but what attracted my attention was the final part of the presentation. I
decided to make the questions regarding the future of cyber security area and what we could
expect about the way that its development would go.

Primarily, I wanted to clarify if the focus of cyber security will be on security software,
incident response strategies or something else. I got quite interesting answers to my
questions and here I would like to provide a brief overview of my current findings.

Introduction

What I could hear at webinar regarding my questions was that the future of cyber security
should provide us with a (security) software which would be capable of protecting itself. In
other words, today’s development and strategies plan to produce a software with a good
self-defense mechanism. And indeed, this seems quite interesting and challenging, but let
discuss how that’s possible.

Just try to imagine a software with self-defense capacities. It’s something like a software with
its own incident-response system. The software capable to make intelligent decisions and
fight for itself. Could we call it an intelligence-led security software or an intelligence-driven
security software? I think we could. We use the prefix “security”, but, in general, every
software should have these characteristics. As it is known, an intelligence-led or intelligence-
driven concept means the system is governed by intelligence. What is the intelligence? By
definition, the intelligence is the information with some analysis applied. So, if we would like
to obtain some intelligence, we should gather some information first and try to analyze it in
order make a good strategy using all that data.

An Intelligence-led Security Software Idea

Today’s security software can provide us with a good prevention scenario, but its incident-
response capabilities are still quite poor or do not even exist. Similarly, as we invoke a new
model of security, so called intelligence-driven security, we should think about a new model
of security software architecture. So, how should the future of cyber security look like? An
intelligence-led security software must be capable of providing the following characteristics:

A comprehensive understanding of risk,

The use of an adaptive algorithm which would be able to adapt to input information,

14 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – April 2014 Edition
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