With 2014 quickly winding down and the dawn of 2015 upon us, this week was a time to reflect as much as it was to look ahead. Many of this week’s news stories focused on the “Year of the Hack.” Others posted predictions on possible security risks in the year ahead. Here are the top stories we tracked:
• Bring Your Own Internet of Things is the New BYOD ¬—Mark O’Neill, vice president of Innovation at Axway, Inc. published a guest post for BetaNews on his predictions for 2015, among which included the rapid growth of IoT business opportunities and the subsequent security risks. For data generated by IoT devices, such as wearables, companies need to be mindful of what data external devices bring into the business – and what they take away from it. Users similarly must be more mindful about how wearables gather their data.
• Users Were the Biggest Losers and Winners in Privacy and Security — Kim Zetter of Wired explains the paradoxical user experience of 2014. The emergence of new products and services to help protect the privacy and security of data and communications was met with revelations regarding how the U.S. government withholds information about security vulnerabilities to exploit them, rather than passing the information on to software vendors and others to fix them.
• To Be Scared Means to Care? — Seth Rosenblatt of CNet focuses on two major expected sources of 2015 data breaches: email phishing and credit cards. The lessons learned from 2014 give a grim outlook for what’s to come in 2015. Data breaches are inevitable, with new security threats piling onto pre-existing ones. For example, traditional phishing emails will go mobile. Must we be scared in order to care, or can our awareness of potential threats embolden us to brave the breach?
• Which 2015 Security Trends Are Worth The Worry — Corey Nachreiner, Director of security strategy and research at network security firm Watchguard, contributed a guest post to ITProPortal that distinguishes between security trends that warrant concern and those that don’t. Don’t lose sleep over the embedded computing devices IoT/IoE, the end of passwords, Software Defined Networks (SDN) adoption, total cloud domination, or security stifling innovation. Sleep with one eye open for cyber espionage, platform-jumping malware, encryption, business verticals as security targets, and “hacktivists.”
What conversations grabbed your attention this week? We’d love to hear from you on the stories you’re tracking, and we wish you a safe and secure New Years!
