Rapid adoption of the cloud, mobility and the internet of things (IOT) will not only open up platforms, but also open up new security threats, says a new research post from Frost & Sullivan (F&S).
Indeed as it looked at the industry’s prospects for 2016, the analyst predicted that security would become the single biggest issue to tackle in the ICT industry with attacks getting more sophisticated and eventually leading to costly consequences. Such things were forecast as a driver for vendors and service providers to acquire specialist security vendors or grow their own practices internally to tackle the diverse issues in security impacting organizations.
F&S regarded incidents such as Ashley Madison as a key driver in the inevitable rise of cyber-insurance. It said that the industry would see cyber-insurance policies that would offer more than just compensation and protection from liability in the event of a cyber-attack.
Looking as to where likely threats would originate, in the home environment, as smart home solutions witness greater adoption, F&S warned that the current vogue to use mobile phones and tablets to control power, cooling, heating, lighting and security would create a number of issues. It cautioned that by allowing one interface to control the various applications of the smart home, security challenges will be a big issue for the industry players to grapple with.
Perhaps more worryingly it also noted that targeted attacks on computer industrial control systems (ICS) would be the biggest threat to nations' critical infrastructure. F&S believes some of the attacks in recent years on industrial control systems —including the Stuxnet attack on an Iranian nuclear plant and the Shamoon attack on Saudi Aramco — have not been publicized.