Like any cybersecurity executive, ThreatConnect CEO Adam Vincent has a lot of thoughts on where cybersecurity is heading in 2017. But Vincent has a different approach and a call to action for those in the industry: Instead of working and protecting clients in a silo, the industry needs to become more collaborative and talk to one another.
"If you don't come together as a community, and you don't share awareness of what's happening to you, then you're just fighting by yourself and every organization is outmatched by themselves," Vincent told DC Inno. "This is a critical area that we need to overcome because if we don't overcome it, we will fail."
Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect, Vincent says, can help with that. The startup developed a Threat Intelligence Platform that allows the cybersecurity community to input and share threat indicators, crowdsource cyber analysis problems, collaborate across security events and also protect organizations against threats.
"This isn’t rocket science," Vincent said. "The inefficiencies of a team working together and not playing from the same sheet of music are a problem."
Vincent said that companies today don't know what's broken because of the lack of teamwork, and, hence, they don't have a clear idea of what needs to improve in their security systems.
"In 2016, what we saw was an emergence or an enhancement in the use of ransomware attacks. Hospitals were being attacked. We saw attacks around academia in particular," he said. "We saw ransomware as, definitely, an emerging way for cyber criminals to make money and it was working, so they're going to continue that in 2017."
Take the Democratic National Committee election email hack. ThreatConnect was able to analyze a small amount of information provided by Orange County, Calif.-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and then connect the dots between the hack and a few Russian agencies using their Threat Intelligence Platform.
"It goes to show you that fighting together is definitely going to be a goal of ours going into 2017 because as a single organization we can't simply defend ourselves with just their own capabilities anymore," Vincent said.
And maybe collaboration can also help with what Vincent sees becoming an even bigger threat in 2017: hacking of Internet of Things technologies, such as self-driving cars or smart home devices. Not enough attention is paid to the security issues surrounding IoT devices, he said.
"I, as a human being, am most nervous about IoT devices actually as the target," he said. "All of these innovations that we think about leverage some kind of Internet-connected device—all of those devices, whether it be your TV in your house or whether it be an electric switching panel in the middle of an electric grid—all of them are computer devices and they all have vulnerabilities."
To get people to collaborate and to get people in the industry ready to fight oncoming hacks, Vincent says the only way is to get more people educated and ready for the cybersecurity workforce. Threats are growing at an exponential rate, he says, and companies are outmatched to defend themselves.
The inefficiencies of a team working together and not playing from the same sheet of music are a problem.
"Education is going to be a major issue for us for the next many many years. Academia is definitely doing a lot in this area, but the threat is still growing in an exponential way," Vincent said. "I fear that our ability to get practitioners and professionals out of academia and get them with some level of experience is still going to be outmatched by the pace at which the adversaries are moving."
So going into 2017, collaboration and educating people so they want to join cybersecurity companies is the best way forward, according to Vincent. It won't be easy, but Vincent is hopeful.
"I don't like to just be doom and gloom. I think that this is going to be the year, in 2017, where we're going to see the real power of collaboration," he said.
"Now we're starting to see a real push for people to do things when before people would talk about it a lot but people weren't actually making the strides to take action."
Image used via CC BY-SA 4.0 — credit AndersonAldair2016
