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Welcome back to my cybersecurity Blog! This week I will be discussing current trends and hot topics in cybersecurity. It is significantly important to be aware of current trends and staying up to date in your field, and especially cybersecurity because technology is constantly changing, and therefore trends are frequently changing. You can stay up to date in your field through online journals, magazines and blogs. Outside looking for specific blog websites, you can create an account on feedly.com, which is a news aggregation website and application, where you can find the most up to date magazine and journal articles in your your field, and organize your interests in a personalized dashboard. Three current trends I found online are AI-powered Attacks, Distributed Denial of Service attacks, and emerging standards for multi-factor authentication. AI-powered attacks occur when hackers use Artificial Intelligence technology for mass production of custom social attacks. These attacks are faster, more adaptive and difficult to prevent and capture. This Topic is important because of how rapidly it can spread. In a Ransomware attack, called WannaCry, it affected 400,000 computers in 150 countries. Distributed Denial of Service attacks, more commonly known as DDoS is an attack where multiple breached computer systems attack a specific target like a server or website and cause a denial of service. The denial of service happens through a flood of information sent to the target, which causes it to slow down and eventually shut down which prevents legitimate users from accessing the system. Standards for multi-factor authentication is not only a trend I researched but something I can personally see through experience. Multifactor authentication is basically a security system that requires more than one method of authentication to grant access to a user. Currently, George Mason University enforces multifactor authentication to access Patriot Web, with is a platform that holds all your academic records and employment information if you work on campus. I work on campus, so whenever I need to access Patriot Web I have to first enter my username and password, then I need to have my phone because a call or text message will be sent to verify that I am the user for this account. This is just one example, companies in all areas have been recently enforcing multiple layers of authentication if a user wants to access their personal web interface. Multifactor authentication is critical for preventing security breaches on individual users and an organization’s assets. I discovered these current trends through a blog post on a website called CSO from IDG. Although the blog post provided a list of current trends, it did not go into detail about each trend, therefore I research each topic and gain a lot of insight from specific trade publications and academic journals. The first article I found pertaining to AI-powered attacks was on the Guardian, an online magazine website. In the Artificial Intelligence section, I found an article titled “Growth of AI could boost cybercrime and security threats, report warns.” The article goes into detail about how AI capabilities are becoming more powerful and widespread and how they are causing threats in the cyber realm. Another journal article I found was on the JSTOR database, and it was from a book called “Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data: Hackers’ Bazaar”. The article was titled “The Black Market and Botnets” and it went into detail about how Botnets have grown over time and how DDoS attacks play the biggest role for botnets. The third article I used was also found on JSTOR. It is called “Multifactor Authentication – A New Chain of Custody Option for Military Logistics”. I used this journal article because it provides useful information on how multifactor authentication works and examples of how it is used in the real world. While these three topics are important cybersecurity current trends, there are several more you should be aware of. Don’t forget that AI powered attacks are on the rise and will continue to grow rapidly, and that multifactor authentication will only become more in depth and stricter in the future, especially at your workplace. Also, don’t forget to make an account on feedly.com to get the most recent cybersecurity and technology news, and use it as a platform for staying up to date with current trends and hot topics. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3250086/data-protection/7-cybersecurity-trends-to-watch-out-for-in-2018.html
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Welcome to my blog spot! This week I will be going over an academic journal in detail from JSTOR, a database of scholarly journals and books. JSTOR was available to access through my university’s library site at library.gmu.edu. The journal is called The Cyber Defense Review and is published by Army Cyber Institute. The purpose of the journal is to provide strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of the cybersecurity field. The journal has been updated with two volumes since 2016, making it three volumes in total. Within each volume, the journal gets updated with summer and spring editions. Each volume has about 150-200 pages consisting of several articles across the cyber domain.
Here is a journal article I pulled from The Cyber Defense Review, it's called "Rising Cyber Threat". The article is from Volume 2, and it talks about how Internet of Things (IOT) enabled Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise. It talks specifically about an incident that occurred in San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, where these IOT enabled DDoS attacks impacted over 2,000 systems. Later, the article brings up several cybersecurity professional and shares their advice on how to defend the nation from increasing cyber-attacks. Overall, the article is brief and gives a recap of major cybersecurity related attacks that occurred in the year of 2016 and advises how that it’s only going to be worse in the future. The Structure of the journal straight forward and easy to comprehend. It had an introduction followed by several attacks from the past year and later advice from several professionals. The style of the articles is very similar to what you would find in a trade publication, it is a few pages, easy to read and provides very informative news regarding cybersecurity. This journal is super easy to find, all that needs to be done is looking up JSTOR from your university’s database search engine, which will be on the appropriate library site for your college. Once you are on JSTOR, you can browse all the different subjects of journals and books, or you can search anything. If you wanted to find articles from The Cyber Defense Review, all you would have to do is look up just that on JSTOR, and all the articles from the journal will get listed. I recommend this journal because it provides a wide variety of cybersecurity topics and all the journals are quick reads making finding information and learning a breeze. |
AuthorPrince Patrick Jackson Clement was born on April 20th, 1997 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Prince is currently attending George Mason University and is doing his Masters in Digital Forensics and Cyber Analysis. Prince is currently working as an IT Support Analyst at MyEyeDr. His career aspiration after graduating college is working at Amazon as a Cloud Solutions Architect. Archives |