Cyber security has become a game of standardizing base defenses and fighting the unknowns. Application risks are overtaking preset network security defenses and everything seems to be moving to the cloud. What used to be a security concern has turned into a mutual trust cloud of services contingent on the user taking responsibility for any security faults. Operational technology is becoming a bottleneck to informational, and cybersecurity is slowly turning into cyber resiliency.
The question now being raised:
What is the future of cybersecurity?
With security concerns being dropped and shifted around for legal concerns, and the automating of low-level threats, the focus of cyber security shifting from human to machine seems more realistic every day. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are two buzzwords used to describe near identically autonomous frameworks. These frameworks, regardless of how you label them, are able to more efficiently than ever analyze big data and make security inferences.
We’ve already begun to commercially standardize the known, how long is it until we standardize the unknown?
How long will it take for an adaptive algorithm to be produced that takes advantage of the cyber resiliency trend that’s been developing over the past few years; how long until space on a server is presented as able to maintain a company’s defenses – not necessarily able to defend against on-going attacks, but providing of a system that prevents existing systems from the majority of attacks and allows companies to preserve themselves rather than hire others to do so.
Then again, hence majority. In any cyber system there will exist the potential for cyber-attacks, and with it comes the need for human-ran cybersecurity teams. The need for immediately adaptive teams that truly know the inner workings of large scale systems rather than a machine learning algorithm that makes inferences about it will always exist.
The current known was once the zero-day unknown; the unpredictable attacks that gave teams of cybersecurity analysts quite prospective career outlooks. The worst of today may be the automated and ignored attacks of tomorrow, and with new attacks come new defenses.
Regardless of what happens in the future of cybersecurity, someone’s gotta be behind the creation of the machine learning algorithms before they’re able to replace us.
