How Bitdefender's Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020 Can Keep Companies Safe

Companies are always in the crosshairs of threat actors, but how do you prepare if you don’t know how your business could be affected. Fortunately, Bitdefender's Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020 offer a framework for the essential security pillars of any company.

Preventing 100% of cyber attacks is impossible, but some problems can be preempted by knowing the direction and the evolution of online and offline threats. Bitdefender's Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020 are a great tool that we can think of as flu shots, immunizing against probable attackers.

Of course, just knowing the likely threats is not enough. Some measures are required, but this is where the expertise of the CISO (chief information security officer) comes into play. Depending on the company's profile, the CISO should prepare for some or all threats predicted to cause problems in the new year.

The term vulnerabilities might be a vague one, but it describes points of entry for bad actors into corporate infrastructure. Unpatched vulnerabilities are often an Achilles' heel in many businesses and are underrated as a potential attack vector.

The number of reported vulnerabilities (CVE) is always on the rise. The more hardware and software inside a network, the more likely it is that some vulnerability will creep in. Keeping both hardware and software up to date has never been more important.

The term “malware” used to encompass mostly viruses, but its complexity and sophistication grows each year. This means companies need to adopt new tools and improve employee training. Cyber awareness is just as crucial as endpoint protection.

The exponential growth of the IoT (Internet of Things) sector is a double-edged sword. It's good for the economy, but it also increases the area of attack. The bigger the company, the greater the chance that a secured network harbors unpatched IoT devices. Companies need proper safeguards, which include keeping devices up to date and creating segregated networks.

One of the more obvious worries Bitdefender anticipates for 2020 is an increase in ransomware attacks. New types of ransomware are always being developed. This, in combination with employee negligence, makes for the perfect storm. Good endpoint protection, cyberaware employees and complete backups are the bare minimum a company should have.

Finally, Bitdefender predicts an increase in cloud-based attacks for 2020, and companies are especially vulnerable since they are likely users of cloud services. Attack vectors can include platforms such as Office 365, Github, AWS, Docker, and many more. The only way to protect against such threats is to set them up properly and keep everything up to date and patched.

It's impossible to completely secure a business, but it’s the CISO's job to set up best practices for planning and response. It only takes one wrong click on a link in an email. But, if companies' security policies are set up with the future in mind, 2020 can be an incident-free year.