Medical devices have gone from simple bandages that help wrap up wounds to MRI machines that scan the body for organ irregularities. With increasing complexity over the last five years, these devices have come to rely on software and the Internet to assist people with more efficiency. Now that these machines are able to communicate with one another, their network is susceptible to data loss and compromise due to cyberattacks. A good example of this was the 2017 WannaCry’s ransomware attack against the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), costing them £92M to recover the data and its subsequent cleanup.

The threats and opportunities Cyber advancements and events took center stage this year. This brought about new threats, opportunities, and solutions that are worth looking back to and learning from. As 2018 comes to a close, let us review four major trends:

Over the past few years, businesses have increasingly shifted towards digital customer communication and records. As efficiency and connectivity of this digitization of business has increased, so have the likelihood and potential damage of cyberattacks. As our society nears yet another informational shift towards 5th generation (5G) wireless networks, these already prevalent dangers to corporate data security will intensify.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become fundamental to cybersecurity. Artificial Intelligence has the amazing capacity for use to protect as well as to do harm. In the wrong applications, AI has a tremendous capacity to render security systems useless. Grasping the scope of AI’s capabilities and strengths and how it can help protect information is, therefore, essential for any firm concerned with data security.

Modern cyberattacks frequently target companies with large data holdings. Last year, Equifax, a credit reporting agency that collects information on nearly 800 million individuals and 88 million businesses worldwide, fell victim to a massive attack that compromised the personal information of 150 million customers. Just earlier this year, GitHub, a major online software development platform, suffered from a DDoS attack that overloaded their servers with simultaneous online traffic of 1.35 TB per second. Attacks such as these are increasingly frequent and are often used to steal valuable customer data from companies. In response to this growing threat, blockchain technology is now being implemented by some companies.

Following the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) earlier this year, privacy and security regulations are taking the worldby storm. The California Consumer Privacy Act, petitioned and signed June 2018, will be put into effect on January 1, 2020. Despite its smaller geographical scope, the law will have significant effect on many businesses.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) offers a messaging service which allows financial institutions around the world to send and receive information and instructions about financial transactions securely.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) came into effect on 25 May 2018. The GDPR law has triggered several immediate changes. The new regulation safeguards security and privacy rights for users. GDPR has forced companies to change their practices on data gathering and processing in many ways.

Application security needs more attention as there is an increasing usage of applicationson smart devices. While security has seen improvements over the years, applications still have vulnerabilities that can expose them to spyware, keyloggers, viruses, worms, and other harmful scripts.