Mass Surveillance Is Cybersecurity's No. 1 Threat

Fifty ethical hackers were surveyed by MonsterCloud, a managed IT service provider, to determine what they believe to be the most imminent, severe threats to cybersecurity in the coming year.

According to the findings, a mass surveillance threat is more likely to occur than a widespread ransomware attack on private citizens. However, the latter was still a high concern for ethical hackers. Ransomware is also a concern held by other experts for 2017, particularly within cloud infrastructure.

“A complete overhaul of our nation’s info-security policies will help,” said ethical hacker and CEO of Red Cell Infosec Dominique Davis, one of the individuals surveyed in MonsterCloud’s study.

All ethical hackers concurred that businesses and consumers are vulnerable to hacking, but some were more concerned than others. More self-taught hackers displayed higher concerns of the likelihood and severity of catastrophic hacks.

Fifty-six percent of ethical hackers surveyed said there was no program available that is completely effective at preventing cyberattacks. Well-known programs like McAfee, Norton Antivirus and AVG were rated marginally effective, while 10 percent of ethical hackers named Bitdefender as their program of choice.

Although it is the most popular operating system, 68 percent of the respondents said Microsoft Corporation Windows is also the most exploitable for security breaches. Only 6 percent of ethical hackers surveyed said Apple Inc. iOS or OS X was a risky operating system in terms of security.

“Companies need to actually start paying attention to security,” said one anonymous ethical hacker in the survey.

Read more at https://monstercloud.com/catastrophic-hacks-exposed