Cybersecurity in 2020: More targeted attacks, AI not a prevention panacea

Given the proliferation of high-profile attacks in 2019, the security outlook for next year--and the next decade--is filled with potential pitfalls, as challenges persist in maintaining the security profile in enterprises, particularly as security operations teams are spread thinner as attack surfaces widen. SEE: Special report: The cloud v. data center decision (free PDF) (TechRepublic) McAfee CTO Steve Grobman and Director of Engineering Liz Maida--who joined the company through their acquisition of Uplevel Security, a firm that applied graph theory and machine learning to security data--spoke to TechRepublic about the security forecast for 2020. In contrast to spray-and-pray attacks, relying on port scanning to uncover low-hanging vulnerabilities, an increase in attacks targeting specific industries are anticipated to continue their rise in popularity. "We've seen a good number of ransomware campaigns where the adversaries have done reconnaissance to really understand the critical assets [and] the defenses, and then tailor the attack in order to get into that environment, to demand a higher payment from the victim," Grobman said. "That really requires a much more sophisticated level of defense for the defenders. The other point that I'd make is...we see the evolution of attacks from just focusing on traditional compute environments, to also focusing on cloud environments. Given that many organizations are shifting key components of their operations into the cloud, it would be natural that adversaries are looking for ways to not only target traditional environments, but also cloud assets," Grobman said.