Five Security Problems You Don’t Know You Should Be Worried About (and What You Can Do About Them)

RSA Conference 2018 USA is approaching and at Blumberg Capital we’ve started discussing what we’re most excited to see. The show floor and breakout sessions are great places to investigate current and upcoming threats and find solutions for them. Of course, many people are interested in the typical security challenges, and while solving them is a requirement for conducting business today, the rapidly emerging challenges (and the innovative solutions for them) are the ones that pique our curiosity.

Here are five lesser-known security threats and potential solutions:

Two-factor authentication isn’t enough. Many businesses are moving to multi-factor authentication because account fraud is increasing, but authenticating a session still leaves you open to fraud from man-in-the-middle and man-in-the-browser attacks, data injection and manipulation, Remote Access Trojan attacks and spoofing. One solution gaining prominence, especially in financial services, is continuous authentication using behavioral biometrics. Behavioral biometrics relies on sensor data obtained from devices, such as how a user holds a smart phone, the pressure and speed of typing, and more (some solutions track 500+ metrics), to continuously analyze and verify that a user is legitimate throughout the session, detecting and preventing fraud in real time.

Client-side malware can steal your customers and revenue. Estimates show 15 to 25 percent of online customer visits are hijacked. This happens when users browse one site and get diverted to another, many times through unauthorized product and promotional ads/pop-ups for competitive products or the same product from a different vendor that are injected into user sessions. Unsuspecting users don’t even know that it’s happening. The problem is particularly acute in e-commerce and financial services, and there are few solutions because the culprit is usually client-side malware – typically not a focus area for security teams. Luckily, there are companies utilizing disruptive technology to stop online journey hijacking by inspecting website traffic using machine learning for real-time detection that blocks the injected malware and prevents this customer abuse.

Simply monitoring the dark web doesn’t protect you or your business. While many people have heard that stolen information is often sold on the dark web, what is less known is the severity and scope of the damage. Hackers work together to scout targets, share attack tools and vulnerabilities, execute attacks and sell stolen credentials, credit cards, intellectual property and more. Experienced national security cyber intelligence operatives have monitored the dark web for years, and now companies can use an enterprise threat intelligence and mitigation platform that actively monitors, analyzes and defends against attack indicators on the dark web to provide threat information relating to your brand, assets, intellectual property, applications, employees, customers and partners. Today’s best solutions correlate traffic and activity across a variety of vectors, issue alerts and automate remediation to prevent attacks before the damage is done. 

Businesses aren’t always in full control of their ads. Fraud in digital advertising can be the result of bot traffic, unauthorized ads being shown to users or charging a business for ads that are not really seen. Advertisers need greater control over digital advertising to prevent click fraud that misrepresents marketing success and drives up budgets. They also need greater control over geographic ad placement as well as proximity to inappropriate content. 2017 saw massive repercussions from advertisements for terrorist and hate sites that ran on Facebook and YouTube, resulting in serious brand damage. We’re keen on solutions that authenticate the quality of digital media and verify both the content and the legitimacy of the impression.

Individual device security does not secure the Internet of things (IoT). IoT (in business, industrial and consumer settings) presents new security challenges. IoT devices are a new kind of endpoint, and there’s no way to install monitoring agents on them, so approaches typically involve scanning and securing IoT-related network traffic. In consumer environments, it’s important to preserve ease of use while enforcing network security controls. Solutions that run on carrier networks or consumer-grade networking equipment to conduct behavioral analysis on traffic from IoT devices can be used to isolate and block compromised devices. The problems presented by FDA regulatory barriers against patching and version updates present additional challenges for networked medical devices in clinics, hospitals and increasingly in home environments.  A novel approach to connected medical device security is to insert a gateway that acts as a specialized firewall between the older devices and newer threats. For industrial uses, the key is to deliver operational security through protocol enforcement, essentially a “white list,” for the myriad of proprietary device protocols produced by commercial vendors.

Staying ahead of the curve is as essential to our success as investors in cybersecurity as it is to yours as a security practitioner. The further ahead you can see emerging threats, the sooner you can take concrete steps to prevent them from damaging your business. RSA Conference continues to be a powerful way to get out ahead of emerging threats.