Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Rich Campagna, CEO at Bitglass

2018: The Future of Passwords and Phishing

In 2018, corporate password policies will become far more strict. The recent rise in breaches has shown how easily cyber criminals can acquire credentials and access sensitive data. By mid-2018, the continued fallout from these breaches will compel some organizations or geo-political powers to eliminate the sole reliance on static passwords. In its place, they will require multi-factor authentication and dynamic identity management. These advanced capabilities will identify suspicious logins and remediate them before a breach occurs. For example, if an employee's credentials are used to log in from multiple locations in an impossibly small period of time, advanced solutions can automatically alert IT and enforce step-up, multi-factor authentication in real time.

While security measures will continue to evolve, so too will cyber criminals' techniques. The days of basic email phishing has reached an end. Computer-savvy individuals can identify signs of traditional phishing emails (fake websites and typos) and are rarely deceived. In 2018, phishing schemes will become much more sophisticated. Cyber criminals will increasingly make use of techniques that are incredibly well disguised. Like the Google Docs phishing attacks of 2017, these new scams will hack or spoof their source in order to steal credentials and corporate data. This is the future of phishing.

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About the Author

Rich Campagna is the CEO at Bitglass. Prior to becoming an integral team member at Bitglass in April 2013, he was senior director of product management at F5 Networks, responsible for access security. Rich gained valuable experience in product management and sales engineering at Juniper Networks and at Sprint before working at F5.