Imagine yourself as a service provider who wakes up one day, pours a cup of coffee, and checks email, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – only to discover a flurry of panicky messages from customers about your service being unavailable. You rush to your management console to find that nothing is working; your entire operating environment is an unresponsive black hole. Racing to your data center, you discover a faceless attacker has wiped out every bit of data you own and maintain on behalf of your customers, erasing every hard drive on the premises.

What’s worse is they have also managed to destroy your backup servers. You have no recovery options.

That’s not an imaginary worst-case scenario. That’s what happened earlier this week to VFEmail.net, a US-based provider of secure email services.

New computers and software can be expensive. If you're using your laptop for your child's homework assignments or keeping your fledgling small business going, you might be tempted to not update your device or software that often. After all, it’s getting the job done, and as the saying goes, “If it’s ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

A lot of people think this way. A recent report found that most people in 2018 are using computers that are on average six years old. Only 2.54 percent of users have a machine purchased in 2017, and nearly 75 percent of users who own a device bought it in 2011 or earlier.

The problem with relying on an older computer is that updating to newer software – from apps to operating systems – can become more difficult. More importantly, relying on outdated operating systems, file- and print-sharing utilities, and applications can expose your computer and all the data you keep on it to tremendous risks.

You purchased cyber insurance to protect your business, just like you bought health insurance to protect yourself and your family. However, in the same way that health insurance can deny a procedure or medication, cyber insurers may deny your claims for business disruption arising from cyberattacks. 

Security professionals talk about cybercrime as though it’s a war, an ongoing battle against malicious actors. Apparently, insurance companies now agree.

Looking back at 2018, the fight against malware showed glimmers of promise, as new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were successfully deployed in some quarters to fight high-priority threats like ransomware.

The outlook for 2019 is less rosy, though, as malicious state actors and cybercriminals prepare for battle with a new array of tools and techniques designed to create mayhem and reap profits at the expense of everyone else.

Buckle up, IT security pros: the following trends indicate the anti-malware ride in 2019 is going to be a bumpy one.