Cybersecurity Predictions From ZeroFOX And Dyadic

James C. Foster, CEO at ZeroFOX, a social media security firm based in Baltimore, give his insight about social media next year.

James C. Foster, CEO at ZeroFOX:

Social media will be the number one vehicle for ransomware distribution in 2018. Currently, there are nearly one million social media accounts compromised every day, and that number will continue to rise thanks to the plethora or easily identifiable targets. And with new channels comes new costs: the average cost of a ransomware ticket will go up 50 percent next year. These actors see that organizations are willing to pay the ransom, so they’ve upped their asking price. And while organizations may be paying a higher ransom, the cost of these attacks are going down due to artificial intelligence tools making these campaigns infinitely easier to carry out.

Dyadic is a security startup focused on encryption and key protection the VP of R&D, Guy Peer, thinks IoT security will play a major role in 2018:

I think we will see more and more threats related to IoT devices. With the continuous spread of smart devices, from watches to cars to utilities, the landscape of attacks is becoming exponentially bigger. From attacking the device itself, using devices for targeted attacks on other resources (such as DDoS attacks) and maliciously collecting and revealing data collected from such devices in the cloud data center, the attack surface is becoming almost impossible to protect.