NEWS

For nine years, Verizon has released its annual Payment Security Report about the state of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. For nine years, the pattern has remained the same: Many companies don't comply with the standard, and many companies that do comply fall out of compliance not long after their audit. IT organizations don't struggle with PCI DSS compliance due to a lack of knowledge or technology; the problem is proficiency.

"Proficiency is the main theme," says Ciske van Oosten, lead author of the report since 2013 and senior manager of global intelligence for security assurance consulting at Verizon Enterprise Solutions. "With 10 years of data breach investigation reports, you start to recognize patterns."

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Over the next two years, enterprises are expected to ramp up their efforts to test blockchain technology as part of a new method of establishing trust in a digital economy.

New research from consultancy Deloitte LLP shows a "trust economy" is now developing around person-to-person (P2P) transactions enabled by blockchain technology and not dependent on more traditional methods such as credit ratings or guaranteed cashier's checks.

"Rather, it relies on each transacting party's reputation and digital identity – the elements of which may soon be stored and managed in a blockchain," Deloitte analysts said in a report.

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Botnets act as a force multiplier for individual attackers, cyber-criminal groups, and nation-states looking to disrupt or break into their targets’ systems. By definition, they are a collection of any type of internet-connected device that an attacker has compromised. Commonly used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, botnets can also take advantage of their collective computing power to send large volumes of spam, steal credentials at scale, or spy on people and organizations.

The Internet of Things (IoT) era has finally arrived, and businesses need to be prepared for a world where everything is connected.

I’m an analyst so I’ll support my proclamation that IoT is here with data: There are currently 25 billion internet-connected devices, and that will double by 2020 and then grow to 80 billion by 2025.

ZK Research

However, there’s a more basic way of understanding where we are in the adoption cycle: IoT has become the norm, not the exception, according to companies I talk to. IT and business leaders no longer look at me like I have three eyes when I say, “IoT.” In fact, in many conversations with them, the term IoT never comes up — yet they are connecting things. Companies are connecting more things because it makes their businesses run better, and over the next decade, this trend will accelerate.

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