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of authentication. Of course, users can prevent these hacks by using multi-factor authentication. We
believe that enough of the public will continue using single-factor biometric authentication in 2019 that
hackers will take advantage of their naivete and pull off a major biometric hack.

8) Prediction: Attackers Hold the Internet Hostage

Description:
Next year, a hacktivist organization or nation-state will launch a coordinated attack against the
infrastructure of the internet.

The industry already saw the impact of an attack against a critical piece of internet infrastructure when a
DDoS attack against DNS hosting provider, Dyn, took down many popular websites including Twitter,
Reddit, and Amazon.com. Around the same time, security expert Bruce Schneier noted that attackers
were probing several unnamed companies that provide similar critical internet services for potential
weaknesses. A DDoS attack of this magnitude against a major registrar like Verisign could take down an
entire top-level domains (TLD) worth of websites. Imagine the impact if every single .com address was
no longer resolvable.

Even the protocol that drives the internet itself, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) operates largely on the
honor system. Only 0.1 percent of the internet’s autonomous system numbers (ASNs, collections of IP
address routes under control of an organization) have deployed Route Origin Validation, meaning the
other 99.9 percent are wide open for hostile takeover from route hijacking.

The bottom line, the internet itself is ripe for the taking by someone with the resources to DDoS multiple
critical points on the internet or abuse the underlying protocols themselves. With nation-state and
hacktivism attacks ramping up recently, we could see cyber attackers actually take down the internet in
2019.

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