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Cybersecurity Landscape Hotspots

Take a glance at the most discussed cybersecurity topics of the week.

If we were asked to say the most popular phrase of the last month, it would definitely be the “risks of IoT”.
In terms of cybersecurity issue, 2018 was a year to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

Biometrics is not a silver bullet

Threatpost on January 9, 2019

Nowadays biometrics tends to be a commonplace like stirring sugar with a teaspoon in a cup of hot drink or shaking the snow off of boots before entering. However, the face recognition or scanning fingerprints on your smartphone seem to be something trickier than we are used to consider.

Actually, the first destination of the biometric technology was to replace or reinforce the two-factor authentication and strengthen the data security of both individuals and corporations. However, cybercriminals possess the intelligence and talent to adapt new security measures and bypass them.

Moreover, some biological characteristics (i.e. fingerprints, facial dimensions) do not change, so our biometric data should be protected even more thoroughly than any social accounts or email addresses. Thus, in addition to the biometrics or 2FA security tools, monitoring users’ behavior and detecting the anomalies will probably become a solution.

3 words, 11 letters and relief – IoT is secure

Dark Reading on January 8, 2019

If we were asked to say the most popular phrase of the last month, it would definitely be the “risks of IoT”. It is not a common phrase. It is a buzz-phrase that (we guess) already makes cybersecurity specialists wake up in the night.

Joking apart, the security of IoT devices remains a hot-button issue because still there are no regulations of users’ data storage and exploitation. Anyway, there are means to prevent cyber attacks that everybody can implement:

  1. Research your device before purchase. Try to determine if the vendor is paying attention to security. For example, does it have security notes online?
  2. Use strong Wi-Fi encryption. Choose the most advanced encryption on the vendor’s website that your router can support (i.e. WPA).
  3. Check the device for additional security configurations and regularly update your device to avoid the latest threats.
  4. Disable features not being used. For instance, if you do not use the laptop’s webcam, it is better to disable it.

The era of privacy and cybersecurity convergence

Harvard Business Review on January 3, 2019

In terms of cybersecurity issue, 2018 was a year to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. The number of significant data breaches, followed by the implementation of the European Union’s GDPR, calling of Apple’s and Microsoft’s CEOs for the new US privacy standards showed that our expectations about the data privacy become more concrete and critical.

To begin with, the raised threat of an unauthorized access to our private data makes us reinforce its security, implementing different machine learning tools. But despite their positive impact on the personal data protection, ML techniques may cause the unintended inferences and threaten our anonymity (ranging from identifying authorship of written text to indicating intimate details about our health).

Nevertheless, privacy will no longer be an immaterial concept and the last year proved its substantial impact on the businesses’ bottom lines. Therefore, as more and more information is created every day, the convergence of privacy and cybersecurity will remain topical over time.

The post Cybersecurity Landscape Hotspots appeared first on EdGuards – Security for Education.


*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from EdGuards – Security for Education authored by edguards. Read the original post at: https://edguards.com/egnews/cyber-insights/cybersecurity-landscape-hotspots/