December is one of my favorite months on the calendar, what with the plethora of customer, vendor and company parties, year end sales on Amazon, and my favorite part, reading every technology article in every newspaper or blog with their year end review and predictions for the coming year and figuring out what’s on everyone’s mind for the year ahead. So here’s another one from me personally: What makes my predictions so different? For starters, mine are correct as referenced in my previous two years of commentary.
For example, in 2017, I provided an interview to CEOCFOInterviews.com and they asked me, "What are you surprised that we cannot do yet with technology?" And my answer was "eventually we are going to have to develop some type of intelligence, an AI (artificial intelligence) that can actually go beyond the ones and zeros (binary), and understand what is happening inside a computer system on a different level and learn to protect and heal itself." (source)
2019 unfolded much the way I predicted it in our year end December 2018 blog post: Phishing attacks were on the way up from the year prior; antiviruses didn’t help and end users were even more gullible. NERO’s response was conducting more cyber security awareness employee trainings to keep our customers up to date with the latest advancing threats. We also invested in AI technology to help us combat these threats (we even saved one of our customers a million dollars in wire fraud (detailed here).
So here is my prediction in 2020: A.I. will become more important than ever both for good and evil. What will become more common in the cyber world for criminal enterprises, as ZDNet.com pointed out, is that “crooks (will be) using AI tools to fake the voices of CEOs to trick workers into transferring money to their accounts. The next step would be to create a convincing video of an executive asking for an emergency funds transfer.” This is going to create a whole other level of phishing that people are not ready for. On the other side, IT companies like NERO will be combating these threats with AI using a combination of human and sophisticated Dark Web intelligence with capabilities to identify, analyze and monitor for compromised or stolen employee and customer data, mitigating exposure to our clients’ digital identity. Our unique platform, called NightCrawler, will be monitoring our customers’ domains for compromised credentials and deploying identity and credit management programs in order to protect our clients’ employees and the customers we serve. We will also continue conducting cyber security training pro-bono to any organization that’s interested, releasing PSAs on best practices, and continue investing in technology to keep our customers safe!
