The never-ending war between hackers and cybersecurity vendors is a fine illustration of the “survival of the fittest” principle.
The leading developers of defensive solutions are dead serious in their resolution to stop attackers in their tracks – and, until recently, were demonstrating considerable success. But this sort of pressure has also been a great stimulus to hackers inventing new tricks, techniques and business models, just in order to stay in business.
This Darwinian burst of evolution has provoked an interesting bidirectional progression, one direction being towards simplicity and the other towards focused sophistication. The effect of both progressions is a growing complexity in the threat landscape. To succeed against this requires levels of inventiveness, resources and experience that only a few market participants, those who are truly worthy of the ‘next gen security vendor’ title, possess.
Does that mean that ‘next generation threats’ have now arrived and are now threatening (forgive the unintended pun) businesses and private users alike?
The answer is yes and no.