Opinion | Five emerging cybersecurity trends we need to watch out for next year

As the old saying goes: It’s always easy to know what the right course of action was after something has happened, but much harder to predict the future. However, by looking at security developments over the past couple of years, it’s possible to forecast what’s likely to happen in the cyber landscape over the next 12 months. Here are five security-related trends that we expect to see and you might be vulnerable to during 2020.

1. Targeted Ransomware: 2019 saw Ransomware exploits getting highly targeted against specific businesses, as well as local government and healthcare organizations. Attackers are spending time intelligence gathering on their victims, to ensure they can inflict maximum disruption, and ransoms are scaled up accordingly. Attacks have become so damaging that the FBI has softened its stance on paying ransoms: the agency now acknowledges that in some cases, businesses may need to consider paying to protect shareholders, employees and customers.