Articles about 2019

Recorded Future has been logging sandbox submissions from its platform as mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework over 2019 and has released a list of the most frequently referenced tactics and techniques.

The most common tactic in the results is Defense Evasion and the most common technique Security Software Discovery. Defense Evasion involves avoiding detection by, among other things, hiding in trusted processes, obfuscating malicious scripts, and disabling security software.

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Cyber criminals launched a barrage of attacks in 2019, spurred on by botnets of infected IoT devices and by attacker interest in the Eternal Blue vulnerability.

Security company F-Secure's global network of honeypots saw 5.7 billion attacks during the year. For comparison, 2018 saw just over one billion attacks, while 2017 saw 792 million.

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The total number of records exposed by data breaches increased by 284 percent last year compared to 2018, with over 15.1 billion records exposed in total.

This is one of the findings of the 2019 Year End Data Breach QuickView Report from Risk Based Security although the total number of 2019 breaches disclosed so far (7,098) is up only one percent.

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Check Point Research has released its 2020 Cyber Security Report, looking at the key malware and cyber-attack trends during 2019.

Even though cryptomining declined during 2019, linked to cryptocurrencies' fall in value and the closure of the Coinhive operation in March, 38 percent of companies globally were impacted by crypto-miners in 2019, up from 37 percent the previous year. Crypto-miners remain a low-risk, high-reward activity for criminals.

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So far this century, one tech startup after another has reshaped the way that we live. Facebook transformed social interaction. Uber changed how we get around. Tinder changed how we date. While these companies have been highly forward-thinking, they have also persistently struggled to solve crucial challenges regarding background checks and user safety.

2019 brought many of these issues into the limelight. Here are four of the most surprising things we learned about startups and sexual offenses in 2019.

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Now that technology is at the core of all business activities, IT finds itself evolving from having a supporting role to having a more central and crucial one. Even for startups, it's important to effectively define IT's place in the organization given the new realities created by the changing landscapes of technology and commerce.

Consider how dramatically this role has changed. Just over a decade ago, IT leaders were concerned with improving connectivity within the workplace and bringing their organizations online. More recently, they’ve had to worry about things like mobile tunneling, GDPR compliance and optimizing real-time business intelligence dashboards.

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I’ve already written one prediction about autonomous cars -- that they’ll be far later to the market than most pundits and autonomous car inventors are suggesting. Today’s prediction is about a tangentially-related technology -- aerial delivery drones. These drones are definitely coming just as fast as regulators will allow them, but I don’t think they’ll be implemented in the way people expect. What we’ll see, I predict, is something I call Pizza-to-the-Neighborhood or PTTN.

Aerial drones are a new type of distribution network operating in a new kind of ether. They don’t travel on roads and neither do they travel in what we conventionally think of as airspace. Flying over cities, which is where these delivery drones are going to be used, airplanes are legally restricted from operating below 1000 feet unless they are actively taking-off or landing. Helicopters get to break this rule a bit because they can claim to be taking-off or landing almost anywhere, but fixed-wing aircraft have to stay above 1000 feet, making below 1000 feet the emerging realm of autonomous drones.

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Prediction #2 -- And then there were only 3.5 VPC Cloud players. Cloud computing will continue to grow in 2019 with the key term being not Public Cloud, Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud -- which are all so 2018 -- but Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Virtual Private Cloud is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) invention but all the AWS competitors seem to be embracing the idea.

What has developed is that the VPC solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019.

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People -- well, investors and financial analysts -- seem to worry a lot about Apple. They tend to see Apple as either wonderful or terrible, bound for further greatness or doomed. What Apple actually is is huge -- a super tanker of a company. And, like a super tanker, it’s hard to quickly change Apple’s direction or to make it go appreciably faster or slower. Those who see Apple as doomed, especially, should remember they are worrying about the most profitable enterprise in the modern history of business. Those who see Apple as immortal should remember that’s impossible.

The worry about Apple in 2019 seems to be that the smart phone market may have peaked, or maybe that Apple has made the mistake of building its products so well that they last too long. Then there’s the concern that Steve Jobs is gone and why isn’t Apple reinventing itself and the world yet again through another new product category?

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Now, finally, to my predictions for 2019. This is, I believe, my 22nd and possibly last year of looking ahead, so I want to do something different and potentially bigger. Our old format works fine but I’ve been pondering this and I really think we’re at a sea-change in technology. It’s not just that new tech is coming but we as consumers of that tech are in major transitions of our own. It has as much to do with demographics as technology. So while I’ll be looking ahead all this week, coming up with the usual 10 predictions, I want to make sure we all understand that this isn’t business as usual. This time it really IS different.

I’ve been thinking about 50 year cycles. The year 1968, which was 50 years ago when I started writing this column back in November, saw a huge social and political upheaval with student riots all over the world, the rise of the hippy movement in the USA, the Summer of Love and the founding of Intel. Most of the technical progress we have seen since 1968 has been driven by microprocessors, which were largely the work of Intel. And it took 50 years, but we’re now approaching the Internet of Things, where processors will be in everything and everything will be linked or monitored, which is either good or bad depending who you are.

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I can’t put this off any longer, so here are the tech predictions I made a year ago for 2018. We have to see how well or poorly I did before we can move on to my predictions for 2019 and beyond. These old predictions have been edited for length, but not to avoid embarrassment. I try to never avoid embarrassment.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that my predictions get longer and longer (this column, alone, is 4329 words -- my second longest, ever) as they have drifted from new products to explaining new strategies. This sometimes works against the prediction since it is often easier to claim success if your goal is vague, but I see it more as a tribute to my readers. Many of you have been with me for decades and the very fact that we are both still here has as much to do with the work as with its results. How the future fits together is just as important as where it is heading.

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As 2018 draws to a close, it's a time not only for looking back over what the past year has offered, but also for looking forward to the new year and what's on the horizon. There's certainly a lot to look forward to in terms of hardware in 2019, but there's also a great deal on the software front.

The developer of the popular image editing tool Paint.NET, Rick Brewster, has shared his vision of what the coming year holds for his software. The 2019 roadmap for Paint.NET is an exciting one, promising migration to .NET Core, support for brushes and pressure sensitivity, and an expanded plugin system.

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More and more devices in our homes and workplaces are gaining smart capabilities as the Internet of Things starts to move from niche to mainstream.

But greater adoption also means an expanded threat surface. So what can we expect to see from the IoT in 2019? We’ve rounded up the opinions of some industry experts.

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Use of the cloud is now well established in many businesses. But that's not to say that it isn’t still a fast moving sector of the industry.

With greater competition than ever and the pace of innovation showing little sign of slowing down, we’ve put together some expert views on what might be in store for cloud users in 2019

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Artificial intelligence has been 'the future' for quite a long time, but it seems that the potential of the technology is at last starting to have an impact on the real world.

What do industry experts think will be the things we'll see from AI in 2019? We've put together some of their opinions below.

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