Class 418: Week 4 Discussion

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Class 418: Week 4 Discussion

In 5 to 10 years’ time, malware will have become more sophisticated and complex. Malware will grow exponentially and there will be a shift from how malware is socially engineered to leveraging new ways of targeting victims. Cyber-attackers, malware authors and engineers, and hackers will utilize high-tech machine learning techniques for victim identification and targeting and outpace defenders by churning and generating multiple thousands of new malware versions with functionally new malicious codes each day to their advantage as Bakdash et al. (2018) submit. This will enable them to exploit changes in the epidemiological patterns and technical details of malware, hence remaining ahead of defenders. Ransomware attackers will leverage the internet of things to create the internet of insecure things characterized by high-level vulnerabilities of systems to rapid remote manipulation, with the collateral damage of compromised systems going beyond the innocent individuals who will get compromised through faults they never committed.

Some of the technologies that hackers might be targeting with their malware in this time frame are technologies that make it easy for them to compromise victims’ information. Such technologies include 5G networks, functional quantum computing, artificially generated deepfakes, the internet of things, and digital media. They are likely to target these technologies because they facilitate quick decryption and cracking of encrypted data, data brokerage, identity manipulation, and the hijacking of communications while allowing high speeds of compromising systems and networks at corporate, individual, and society levels. Also, these technologies will be hackers’ primary targets because they lessen the timeframes of solving algorithmic problems needed in encryption of data and bypassing security protocols, making their hacking work easier than it is currently.

References

Bakdash, J. Z., Hutchinson, S., Zaroukian, E. G., Marusich, L. R., Thirumuruganathan, S., Sample, C., … & Das, G. (2018). Malware in the future? Forecasting of analyst detection of cyber events. Journal of Cybersecurity, 4(1), tyy007.