7 New Year’s Security Predictions from Top Vendors

Ransomware practitioners will have the cloud in their sights next year too, predicts WatchGuard.

“Despite its far-reaching damages and soaring revenues, ransomware has largely left the cloud untouched,” the company notes. “As businesses of every size move both their servers and data to the cloud, it has become a one-stop shop for all of our most important data. In 2020, we expect to see this safe haven crumble as ransomware begins targeting cloud-based assets including file stores, [AWS] S3 buckets, and virtual environments.”

That’s not the only twist in store for ransomware in 2020 either, according to Vicente Diaz, a security researcher at Kaspersky. Attackers may start threatening to publish data they stole from businesses, he speculates, rather than render that data unusable. 

Diaz expects ransomware strikes to be more targeted as well. “Attackers will focus more on organizations that are likely to make substantial payments in order to recover their data,” he says. 

On the plus side, Douglas Brockett, president of StorageCraft, anticipates the emergence next year of a powerful new anti-ransomware weapon: blockchain. BDR solutions that use blockchain ledgers to verify the authenticity of backups, he notes, can prevent attackers from overwriting or deleting protected data, allowing end users to safely restore files to their pre-infected state.

“While it may take a while for blockchain to be adopted in the financial markets or in other consumer applications, its real-world use case as a mechanism to prevent ransomware attacks will gain swift adoption,” Brockett predicts.