The new Booz Allen Hamilton Foresights report is based on the continual research and analysis conducted by our cyber threat intelligence service, Cyber4Sight.
Consisting of a team of analysts with collective fluency in 16 languages and a powerful array of automated collection tools, Cyber4Sight trawls more than 160,000 open sources and hundreds of sites that lay beyond the consumer-facing Internet, providing continuous monitoring, reporting, and threat intelligence services to prominent enterprise clients.
The collaborative process to create the 2017 Foresights report brought together Cyber4Sight’s most experienced analysts with subject-matter experts from across Booz Allen. Together, they reviewed the totality of Cyber4Sight’s portfolio of tens of thousands of reports from throughout the year, seeking out the most significant stories, identifying cybersecurity trends and trajectories, and attempting to conceptualize what the coming months and years may have in store for our clients and the broader technology field.
The result is an annual spotlight of Cyber4Sight’s threat intelligence analysis, drawing on trends and forces from this and prior years in an effort to forecast what the future holds for network security and global policy.
The predictions we explore include:
- Enterprise environments provide the most fertile territory for aspiring ransomware operators.
- Beyond distributed denial of service—the Internet of Things as an enabler of expanded network compromise.
- China’s cyber espionage will ramp back up in 2017 as a new U.S. administration takes power.
- We'll see the gradual decline of POS malware in favor of e-commerce-focused malware.
- Proliferating cyber tools could lead to an increasing number of states sponsoring cyber attacks.
- Stock markets could solve the vulnerability monetization problem.
- The specter of physical destruction: A new approach to influence operations in cyberspace.
- No one will care about mainframe security until something terrible happens.
