Top 5 Security Predictions for 2013 from ISF

As 2012 draws to an end, security solutions providers are rushing the forecast of the security threats that will have the most impact next year. The Information Security Forum (ISF), a leading organization on information risk management and cyber security, is one of them.

According to the ISF, there are five major threats that will be most prevalent in 2013: cyber security, big data, data security in the cloud, supply chain security, and consumerization.

Experts believe that, in 2013, anyone whose intellectual property can be used for profit or as a vantage point can become a target of cyber espionage. Governments should seriously start focusing on the protection of critical infrastructure, and they should even prepare for the eventuality of a full telecommunications blackout.

As far as the supply chain is concerned, a large number of organizations have been affected by malicious operations that targeted their suppliers. Such incidents will likely continue and more companies will become victims.

Big Data has a lot of advantages, but the security risks that come with this concept are great. The biggest challenge for companies in 2013 will be to secure not only the data inputs, but also the Big Data outputs.

Many businesses have started to realize the importance of data security in the cloud and have begun implementing security and compliance strategies. However, most of them are still a long way from achieving this goal, mainly because they still don’t know in which areas they’ve implemented cloud services.

Finally, the bring your own device (BYOD) trend should be a major concern for most organizations. It’s easy for employees to lose the boundary between work and personal data, and this could lead to accidental disclosure of sensitive information.

Also, since sharing location via GPS-enabled devices has become so popular, crimes that exploit such information will become more common.

“Organizations must prepare for the unpredictable so they have the resilience to withstand unforeseen, high impact events.

“We recommend thinking about threats in the context of the most valuable resources in your organization, consider which threats are most likely to create significant risk and which could have considerable impact,” said Steve Durbin, global VP of the ISF.

“Finally, share these threats and resilience based approaches to mitigating risk with senior management and other functions such as risk management, risk committees and business continuity planning teams,” Durbin added.