According to Forbes, based on a report by Risk Based Security research newly published in 2019, during the first six months of 2019 has seen more than 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches exposing an incredible 4.1 billion compromised records. Businesses of all sizes need to get their security act together, with the business sector accounting for 67% of the reported breaches and 84.6% of the exposed records according to the report.

Though businesses become more technologically advanced, but as data is shared across the internet, there is more susceptibility for data threats and vulnerabilities. There has been emerging web security, application security and mobile application security threats that continue to dominate today’s business world. However, in this year 2020, there is a need to understand and know about the top cyber security trends that businesses should watch out and effective mobile and website security testing should be opted.

What is security testing?

Security Testing is taken up to identify threats and vulnerabilities in the system. It also helps in detecting possible security risks in the system and ensuring a failsafe application. Businesses today should ensure that security testing is taken up for all developed applications.

What are Cyber Security Trends to Look in 2020?

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1. Growing Attacks of Ransomware and Phishing:

Hackers continue to use publicly available information across the internet to hack personal and other critical business data. Global ransomware damage costs are predicted to hit $20 billion in 2021, up from $11.5 billion in 2019, $5 billion in 2017, and just $325 million in 2015, according to a report by a leading Cybersecurity firm. According to another CIO report, Ransomware took the industry last year, leeching off smaller entities such as state governments, healthcare facilities, and school districts.

According to the FBI, hospitals and health care institutions continue to be the primary targets of these ransomware attacks. There are usually costs involved in paying the ransom and then getting restored their network systems.

These attacks have been so rapid that certain healthcare providers were affected and were unable to deliver critical healthcare to their patients. Another rather annoying fact is that certain victim companies reported data loss even after they paid the ransom demanded by the hackers.

Hence, end-to-end web security testing and application security testing by leveraging expert testing companies should be taken up.

2. Integrating AI,and ML to Counter Security Threats:

There are so many advances in Data Science that have been effectively used with advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

AL and ML are being used in more and more products in all market segments including cyber security. Various ML algorithms are used for face recognition and threat detections. Biometric logins are increasingly being used by either scanning fingerprints, retina or palm prints. Biometric logins are highly useful to achieve a positive AI contribution to cyber security.

AI is also used to detect threats and certain other malicious attacks. AI and ML can collaboratively be used to determine ransomware and malware attacks before it enters the system and then specifically isolate it.

3. Expanding Cloud Security Threats:

Undoubtedly most businesses are shifting more workloads to the cloud due to its easy 24X7 access and fewer infrastructure overheads. But, organizations need to overcome various data security breaches in cloud computing.

Some of the most important cloud security threats include data breach, critical data loss, abuse of cloud services, insecure interfaces and security issues with application programming interfaces (APIs).

Some of the other include malware infections and identity theft that continue to cause a lot of concerns to enterprises. Hence, thorough digital testing and cloud application security testing should be taken up by experienced security testing companies to realize the full benefits of a cloud environment.

4. Mounting Mobile Apps Security Risks:

With the enormous mobile apps running across business sectors, poses a major threat to security vulnerabilities. While at the time of developing these mobile apps, much importance was not given to security testing to be a part of the mobile application development process.

Hence, with increased digitalization and mobile apps being the major medium for entire e-commerce businesses, it is today an utmost priority to embrace mobile application security testing by independent testing companies to get the full benefits out of the business-critical mobile apps.

5. Increasing Attacks on IoT Devices:

In today’s era where smart technologies like a hotspot, IoT (Internet of Things), IIoT (Industrial Internet of things) started to penetrate every facet of life, security is largely getting compromised. Though there are enormous benefits with this smart technology but still, some of its loopholes result in possible cyber attacks resulting in loss of data.

It is an important fact that many of these connected devices do not have security built-in at the device level. Hence they become more prone to security threats.

Thus, application security needs to be tested using paid and open source security testing tools for mobile applications to enable thorough security across connected devices.

6. Striking Cyber Security Skills Gap:

Undoubtedly, there is an increasing demand for cyber security professionals but the supply is very low when compared to demand.

According to a report, the estimated current cyber security workforce is 2.8 million professionals, while the amount of additional trained staff needed to close the skills gap is 4.07 million professionals.  The data indicates a necessary cyber security workforce increase of 145% globally.

There should be a proper strategy by enterprises to raise their workforce through upskilling them, enabling training and skill development with transferring proper knowledge. There is a need to increase cyber security professionals as the number of security threats continues to rise uncontrolled across businesses.

7. Increasing Investments in Cyber Security:

A report by a research firm states that cyber security spending is predicted to exceed up to $1 trillion from 2017 to 2021.

Worldwide spending on information security of products and services is increasing in leaps and bounds.

How Should Businesses Overcome Cyber Attacks in 2020?

Experts say mobile will be the primary phishing vector for attacks in 2020 and hence effective end-to-end mobile application security testing by an expert testing company should be aligned to become secure.

As corporate infrastructure moves towards the cloud, there is more chance for cyber-attacks and comprehensive cloud application security testing should be adopted to make your cloud environment secure.

What Tools Are Recommended for Application Security Testing?

There are many open source security testing tools and paid security testing tools in the market to ensure that your mobile and cloud applications are secure. This way businesses can leverage mobile application security testing tools to ensure their systems, mobile apps, cloud networks are all free from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

A few Open-source Security testing tools:

SonarQube: This is a popular tool used for continuously inspecting the quality of the code and security of the codebases. Also, this tool is efficient to guide the development teams during code reviews. This tool efficiently supports 27 programming languages and thus, it is easier to pair-up with the already existing software pipeline.

SQLMap: This tool can successfully automate the procedure of exploiting and detecting SQL injection. It is build up with a powerful detection engine and supports several niche features. The tool also has a broad range of switches for database fingerprinting which is done by fetching data from the database.

Grabber: This tool is efficiently known as a web application scanner. This simple and portable tool is used to scan and detect vulnerabilities on the website. It has several features such as file inclusion, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, etc.

Arachni: This is a multi-platform tool with a high-performance Ruby framework, it helps administrators and security testers to evaluate the security of the application.

A few Commercial Security Testing tools:

HP Webinspect: This tool is popularly known as the web application security testing tool. It helps in identifying the vulnerabilities in the application. Also, the tool is effective to monitor the configuration of the webservers as it is used to perform cross-site scripting, parameter injection, and more.

Acunetix: This is one of the prominent security testing tool commonly known as a web vulnerability scanner. It performs several functions such as PCI compliance reports, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, etc. Also, it is capable of performing out-of-band vulnerability testing.

Kiuwan Security: This is a cloud-based platform for Enterprise Software Analytics and Application Security. This tool can help teams of any sizes meet their goals with a wide range of features such as to detect security vulnerabilities, reduce issues, increase productivity, etc.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly with the speed of technological innovations around Smart devices, IoT connected devices, mobile apps, and cloud networks have increased the possibility for cyber security attacks.

These systems are more prone to rampant attacks due to their lack of proper security evaluations embedded in the systems. Hence, an expert security testing company will prove handy to enable connected systems that are more secured.