With all of the cybercrime, famous spammers, and hacking in the headlines, you may think to yourself what will network abuse be like in the next 10 years? Much like the technology in general, the industry of network abuse is rapidly evolving, and difficult to predict where it will lead in the future.
Here are some predictions and tidbits of what you can possibly expect network abuse to look like in the next 10 years.
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Cyber Security: a $60 Billion Industry
In 2013, Richard Stiennan’s article on Forbes.com entitled “IT Security Industry to Expand Tenfold” stated its expectation that a substantial IT Security expansion would occur within the next ten years.
Here we stand in 2016, just 3 years after his prognostication, and the IT security industry is booming. Mr. Stiennan wrote his article for Forbes at a time when the IT Security industry was a $60 billion industry made up of government and private spending on firewalls, anti-virus, anti-malware, authentication, encryption, and many other products.
According to a more recent article in Forbes, the federal government alone has spent $100 billion over the last ten years and has allocated $14 billion for IT security spending in 2016. Extending that $14 billion government annual spending figure over the next ten years, we reach a staggering $140 billion industry estimate that comes just from government spending on IT security.
Corporate Security
The corporate world has increased its expenditures to fight cyber attacks. One frightening statistic tells us that experts expect cybersecurity IT jobs in the US alone to go unfilled to the tune of 1.5 million by 2019. It appears that the workforce is not keeping up with the demand for this particular skill set.
As a result, corporations are turning to managed security and outsourcing companies to fill the labor void and help them prevent/keep up with cybercrime. Those in the know expect the managed cybersecurity market to grow from $8 billion in 2015 to $30 billion in 2020.
Cyber Insurance
The US currently enjoys a $1 billion cyber insurance market. If experts are correct this market will expand to $2.5 billion in just the next two years. It will also expand from a primarily US market to a global market in the next five years. As we will see, hackers know no physical boundary to their criminal enterprise.
The Internet of Things and Mobile Security
The fastest-growing security market is in mobile security where experts expect a 30%+ increase in the next four years. Hackers will ply their trade against our beloved smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and office and home appliances as our machines become more connected to each other — and more accessible to hackers — through the internet.
So, what types of cyber crimes are on the network horizon?
Cybercrime is changing the way criminals do their work.
For instance, traditional bank robberies dropped 23% from 2011 to 2012, after having dropped 60% between 1991-2011. Now, criminal hackers use skimming devices and other cyber tools to steal money without having to break through physical walls. Hotel thieves rob hotel rooms using remote door entry hacks.
Ransomware attacks — already on the rise — will become even more prevalent. We tie all of our work and financial lives to online accounts so we can expect the cybercriminals will go where the money is and will use new hacking tools that they will create. We will have to put away our ideas that cybercrime can only be carried out on a computer or as part of what we currently think of as a computer network. For instance, our computerized cars are potential targets, too. A Formula One car recently had to stop its preseason testing when the car’s computer system became infected with malware.
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Computers are becoming more and more involved in the running of our personal lives, our offices, our electricity, our heating systems, our refrigerators, our lighting systems. Cybercriminals hacking into our computer networks will be able to power down utilities, fry our circuits, maybe even disconnect us from the power grid.
Imagine a cybercriminal hacking into a bank’s computer network and conducting a “bricking”. Such a hacker could not only freeze the bank’s network for a time but they have been known to destroy the physical computers themselves; in other words, turn them into bricks so they cannot be turned back on and the bank loses all the information that the computers contain.
Though we can try to predict what network abuse will look like over the next 10 years, there will always be unforeseen cybercrime tactics and new strategies used to break down security precautions. Networks must be prepared for the expected and the unpredictable.
To learn more about how AbuseHQ can solve your network abuse challenges and get you ready for the next decade of what the Internet brings, get in touch with our team to arrange a trial of AbuseHQ using or contact form.
