Predictions Archives - L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd.

Review of my 2018 predictions.

Liam — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 09:28:41 +0000

I continue not to see many people who make predictions for the coming year actually come back to review what they predicted. As I showed last year, I’m not one of those, so here is my review. I’ve included the original text below in blue, but the full article for my 2018 predictions is here.

1. There will be another large scale incident on a similar scale to WannaCry

Every year there are really large attacks using different methods to cause problems. In 2016 we saw huge floods of data attacking online services. This flood was caused by poorly secured internet connected security cameras. 2017 saw Ransomware worms in WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya. The latter of these was quite ingenious in the way it worked, as it used different methods to move around networks, once it successfully infected a machine. I’m going to guess that we’ll see something of similar complexity being used, perhaps in a more targeted way – possibly by way of altering a widely used application’s source code and lying dormant until activated.

There was one huge, record breaking event, but it didn’t feature in most of the global news as it affected a US based service provider. It was a large distributed denial of service attack, which I reported here. Earlier in the year, there was a situation where websites that used a certain popular plug-in were “mining” virtual currency for the bad guys. In September, there was number of well known websites, like Ticket Master and British Airways, who had their payment pages compromised. People who used those sites had their credit card information stolen.

I’ll take a partial on this, as the stories above didn’t have the same kind of media frenzy or global awareness as previous incidents.

2. Past Data Breaches will impact victims financially on a large scale

With so many data breaches occurring throughout 2017 (and for years earlier), there is a huge amount of useful and usable data that the evil doers can, if they used some big-data methodologies, mine to extract and target individuals and hit them financially. It’s not credit card numbers I’d be worried about, as the issuers are fairly good at catching fraud and protecting the card holder. It’s all of the other information that could be used to craft a very convincing e-mail/letter/WhatsApp message that will cause the victim to send money to the bad guys.

I reckon I got this one. Old passwords that were breached a long time ago (possibly from the 2012 LinkedIn breach), were used to make a sextortion e-mail appear more credible and a lot of people fell for it. According to some reports, 1,000 people paid approximately $500,000. An earlier analysis of the payments showed that some people paid up to $4,900, with the average being $1,900.

3. GDPR will cause a big Facebook-type company to be fined

I suspect there are individuals out there waiting in the long grass for May 25th 2018 to roll around so they can launch all manner of subject access requests on various companies and government departments that they don’t like. Just to be a nuisance. I do, however, expect that some large global corporation, that has a lot of personal data on a huge number of people, will end up being investigated and, either in 2018 or 2019, be levied a massive, multi-million Euro fine. But they will fight back and hold up the imposition of the fine for a number of years. They may even expose flaws in the GDPR legislation.

The cases are still under investigation, so I’ll take a partial on this, but it’s not a Facebook-type company that is going to be fined, but Facebook themselves. They currently have multiple post-GDPR investigations underway with the Data Protection Commission.

4. Crypto-currency hack

If BitCoin is still a valuable thing in 2018 (and hasn’t crashed and burned), I expect the evil doers will be doing their best to hack the BitCoin block chain in order to steal some of that sweet, sweet virtual currency.

This was a miss. I’ve not heard of any successful block chain hacks and BitCoin’s value has fallen so low, it’s probably not worth the effort to attempt to hack it any more.

5. Data breaches will see a massive increase in reporting in Ireland

While there have been data breaches reported in Ireland, they are few and far between. However, I fully expect that the requirement to report data breaches to the Data Protection Commissioner under the GDPR, will cause an increase in the reports of data breaches occurring. I have a useful short video here showing that there are many different types of data breach that might need to be reported.

This was a kinda easy one to predict. In 2017, there were on average 230 data breaches reported to the Data Protection Commissioner each month. Two months after the GDPR had been implemented, the Data Protection Commission (as it is now known) had received nearly 600 data breach notifications per month.

Results for my 2018 predictions

2 correct, 2 partials and 1 incorrect. Not too bad.

I don’t plan on doing this again next year. However, if enough people ask me to do so, then I’ll reconsider. Send me an e-mail at info@L2CyberSecurity.com and let me know if you want to see a 2019 set of predictions.

Wishing you and yours a safe and secure 2019.

Lets be careful out there.

#SecuritySimplified

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What will 2018 bring?

Liam — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 11:42:43 +0000

So what will 2018 bring to us all in the areas of cyber security and data privacy/protection? I had a go at this predicting thing last year and you can see how I got on here.

With reasonable results, I thought I’d give this another go. So I’ve wet my finger-tip & held it aloft, cast some dice, read some tea leaves and consulted my inner oracle and here goes my best guess.

What will 2018 bring? Here are 5 Predictions

1. There will be another large scale incident on a similar scale to WannaCry

2. Past Data Breaches will impact victims financially on a large scale

3. GDPR will cause a big Facebook-type company to be fined

4. Crypto-currency hack

5. Data breaches will see a massive increase in reporting in Ireland

Happy New Year to you all!

I’ll come back in 12 months and do another review to see how I got on.

In the meantime I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you are all safe and secure in 2018.

Lets be careful out there.

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Review of my 2017 predictions.

Liam — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 15:02:53 +0000

I don’t see many people who make predictions for the coming year actually come back to review what they predicted. I’m not one of those though, so here is my review. I’ve included the original text below in blue, but the full article for my 2017 predictions is here.

1. Ransomware levels will plateau, but constantly change

This might be an easy one to get right. Ransomware is already embedded in over 90%+ of all phishing e-mails, so there’s hardly any further room to keep growing. We’ve already started to see the way it is changing though. As was reported earlier this month, you could get your files unlocked if you infected two friends with this Ransomware rather than paying money over to the hackers.

I haven’t seen the stats yet, but I suspect Ransomware is still as big a problem as it was 12 months ago. And as noted, the evil doers have started using new methods to get money out of people by hijacking the victims computer processing power to mine crypto-currencies (i.e. create new currency for them). We also had the scary prospect of Ransomware worms thanks to WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya. So I’m going to say I got this one right.

2. Smart Device Botnets will target the big service providers

We’ve seen record breaking botnets created this year by poorly designed and poorly secured smart devices (also referred to as IoT, e.g.- internet connected cameras, digital video records, internet routers, etc.). I suspect the evil doers are building a massive army, much bigger than anything we have seen to date. I believe that they will then carry out a coordinated attack on one of the big service providers (e.g.- Google, Amazon or Microsoft). The attack won’t be fully successful, but will have caused sufficient disruption to make smart device security a focus for all manufacturers of such devices, as insecure devices will be banned from accessing the web.

This was a miss. While attacks did take place, there was nothing on the scale that we saw in 2016.

3. There will be an even bigger data leak than 2016’s revelation of the Yahoo! world record leak

Yahoo! has really had a bad year, setting a world record, having already had an even bigger world record. I believe bigger leaks have already happened and will be revealed next year. I reckon the bad guys are already combing through the data, cracking passwords and will then create tools that will take the IDs and passwords they have and try these against other services (e-mail, social media, etc.) to generate a list of compromised accounts, which are extremely valuable on the dark net.

I got this one right. It was Yahoo! that did it again, with over 3 billion records breached.

4. Russia will be accused of interfering in elections occurring across Europe

Russia has shown form this year, interfering with the US Presidential Election. With elections happening in the bigger European Countries (Germany, France and The Netherlands) in 2017, I would not be very surprised to discover that the Russian state hackers tried to influence the results of these.

While the German and Dutch elections were not outwardly (at least) subject to the same issues as affected the US elections, there was an incident during the French elections which looks likely to be an attempt to influence the voters. A dump of campaign documents including emails and accounting records for Emmanuel Macron’s campaign was released just before a moratorium on communications came into effect. So I’ll take a partial on this one.

5. More Irish people will be protecting themselves from Cyber Threats

I’ll be a bit selfish with this one as I will be the one helping these people to protect themselves. People knowing how to stay safe on-line will be the least likely to be affected by a Cyber Threat.

While I did protect more Irish people in 2017 by educating them, it wasn’t as many as I would have liked. So, again I will take a partial on this one. A little something called the GDPR became more important to people so, in conjunction with Molly O’Neill, we created training and awareness programmes for businesses.

Results for my 2017 predictions

2 correct, 2 partials and 1 incorrect. Not too bad. I may give this another go for 2018.

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What will 2017 bring in Cyber Security?

Liam — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 17:40:28 +0000

5 Cyber Security Predictions for 2017

Lots of people do these type of lists, but since this is the end of my first year in business, I might as well be no different.?

1. Ransomware levels will plateau, but constantly change

2. Smart Device Botnets will target the big service providers

3. There will be an even bigger data leak than 2016’s revelation of the Yahoo! world record leak

4. Russia will be accused of interfering in elections occurring across Europe

5. More Irish people will be protecting themselves from Cyber Threats

Happy New Year to you all!

So I’ll come back in 364 days and see how I did. Then the following day, I’ll make another list. ?

Wishing all my clients and contacts and safe and secure 2017.

Let’s be careful out there.

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