George Beebe, VP and director of studies, the Center for National Interest, US.

One thing is constant in cyber security, and that is change. Experts across the board agree that it is impossible to maintain an effective defence against cyber crime without constantly evolving to meet the array of increasingly complex and sophisticated threats.

What worked in the past is no long effective, much in the same way that today’s security tools and solution will not work tomorrow.  Attacks and breaches are growing in numbers daily, and are getting stealthier, employing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to evade the security nets.

It’s no surprise then that organisations of every type are battling to keep up.

According to George Beebe, VP and director of Studies at the Center for National Interest, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C.,  AI as a means both of attack and defence will be the biggest security trend in 2020.

It’s not only attackers that can benefit from AI, he says. It can be used to identify potential threats, gain local context, perform threat research, and apply intelligence that is gathered to decide how alerts should be prioritised – all tasks which when done manually, can take hours or weeks to finish – a job AI can do in minutes.

In terms of how he sees the threat landscape evolving over the next five years, Beebe says: “I think there will be much greater activity and danger in attacking the vulnerabilities in the Internet of things. I also expect that governments will lock down data along national lines much more intently and effectively.”

You cannot tackle the cyber security problem through technology alone.

George Beebe

Offering advice to organisations, Beebe adds: “You cannot tackle the cyber security problem through technology alone. It requires a mix of technology and human expertise – cyborgs, if you will, rather than robots – to maximise effectiveness.”

Beebe will be presenting on ‘Lessons from failure: How cyber security professionals can learn from analytic mistakes in other fields’, at the ITWeb Security Summit, which will be held as a virtual event from 25 to 28 August.

Delegates will be able to access the entire event from the comfort of own homes or offices, cutting out travel time, and will be able to pop in and out of sessions as they wish, without disrupting anyone. They can juggle work deadlines with the sessions that appeal to them the most, and do not need to choose between sessions as all conference materials and recordings will be available online.