By Vishal Shah, Co-Founder, and CEO, Synersoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving field with the birth of new threats and ways to combat them that are constantly in action. It is not a stretch to imply that tomorrow’s newest technology might be a generation old today. In fact, it is possible that the meaning of cybersecurity changes altogether in the future. But the need now is to effectively deal with the known methods of cybercrime, like phishing, identity theft, ransomware, DDoS attacks, and data breaches with the help of integrated and collaborative strategies.
Additionally, to mark the complete elimination of such crimes the target has to be awareness drives, improved standards of app designs, and stricter information security compliances. Even government agencies, especially CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) need to democratize information about cyber threats. However, because it is so dynamic, cybersecurity requires ongoing skill development.
It catches those off-guard who look forward to planning a career in Cybersecurity. Self-Driving cars, cryptocurrencies, robots, the Internet of Things, and blockchains are things we don’t perceive in our daily lives as common objects. They will be part of our lives sooner than we anticipate. It will result in more challenging, complex, and damaging cybercrimes.
We need a three-prong approach to picture the latest trends of Cybersecurity keeping in view how quickly these emerging technologies are becoming an integral part of our lives. We can call it the WWW approach. Why, and Who are the key considerations in this approach? It can be elaborated by answering? Why adopt? What can go wrong, and Who will protect?
The Crypto Economy
The world economies are in a great dilemma about the legitimacy of cryptocurrency. Whether economists like it or not, cryptocurrency and exchanges are the reality. For the common public, it is a complex subject as they are curious, experimental, and speculative about it.
Due to the fact cryptocurrency scam makes the headlines frequently, some governments are cautious about including them in their mainstream economy, and some are in denial. Cybercrimes conspiring fake cryptocurrencies, speculative schemes, money laundering, and terrorism funding have the ability to potentially destroy economies. In order to protect the economies and ensure a play, we would need a new generation of cyber police in action.
Self-Driving Cars
The answer to adopting self-driving cars and replacing human drivers is improved road safety, convenience, and quality of life. There is a pressing need to figure out the reason behind the cause of accidents and it is definitely not the bugs in the system. Things can go wrong even if we have a perfectly functional self-driving vehicle system.
Something absolutely out of the picture can happen too like terrorists taking over the control of the vehicle to execute the attack or hackers stealing the big data jeopardizing the privacy and safety of users. To overcome such threats a new generation of cybersecurity experts would be needed. The security of the software, central servers, and the formidability of the communication network will be the significant factor determining its
cybersecurity.
Today’s generation of cybersecurity experts may be able to take care of
software and central server security because they are trained to deal with DDoS attacks and data breach attempts. But a large number of experts would be needed to secure communication protocols with an innovative approach which would further require realigning the education curriculum with vocational requirements to obtain more cybersecurity professionals.
The IoT Revolution
Humankind first discovered the potential of the internet as the democratization of information amongst the people and it was only until now that it has learned about the potency of its byproduct Internet of Things, popularly known as IoT. The Internet seems to have influenced its presence over a range of things starting from household appliances, vehicles, agriculture equipment, soil sensors, irrigation equipment, water
management, medical devices, surveillance equipment, and industrial robots to weapons.
AI assistance, quality of life, operational efficiencies, and just-in-time
the response is the answer to Why Adopt IoT? Knowing how easily we could visualize what can go wrong with IoT is scary. Any maliciously intended manipulation can damage the human race more than weapons of destruction invented to date. The majority of cybersecurity professionals are good at dealing with threats that are mainly about DDoS, ransomware, SQL injection, or application security. However, there is a demand for a different generation of cybersecurity experts who can work with protocols,
digital signal processing, and security at the sensor level.
In light of this, it is necessary to modify engineering courses and create new simulation-related content. Many other such developments in terms of threats and their countermeasures will shape the future of cybersecurity.