Ah yes, it’s that wonderful time of the year. The Christmas hangover has subsided, the Easter Eggs are on the shelves in the stores and your workload is now triple that of what it was in December as everyone moves jobs over the Festive vacation leaving you carrying the can for your organisation (again!). So what you need is yet another predictions blog to bring more joy to the world.

So in a light-hearted kind of way, here are some predictions that probably won’t happen but will be tenuous enough so that a future blog can look back at this and use words like ‘visionary’, ‘futurist’ and ‘demi-god’ … well maybe not that last one!

So before you look at just the titles and scroll by, understand that this is an amusing blog with hints towards the serious commentary!

Prediction 1: Robots

The Robots will not rise up but they will appear in pretty cool YouTube videos doing useless things like backflips. Seriously though, Boston dynamics and MIT are way ahead of the curve when it comes to robotics so instead of showing bi-peds doing something useful like going around your house at 2am removing Legos from your carpet, nope, they have them doing backflips. Why? Well, because someone has a GitHub account with some code in it for backflips probably! I do expect people to still be conned by the one where the robot does go after the testers that goes viral. They are fun, but also an ethic prod that maybe we need to have some consideration towards our mechanical friends.

Prediction 2: AI

Nope, I have spared you the crushing disappointment of a second movie to AI, you know.. the one that sucked? I think 2020 will bring us new language in AI. We are finally going to get some government-issued cards to put with our Preparedness leaflets just underneath the menu for the Chinese that closed 3 years ago. Because so many people now say AI when they mean a clever formulae, ML when they mean, ‘I wrote some Python’ this will be the year when we finally work out what the hell everyone is talking about. More seriously, especially around the self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles arena, we are probably going to see a universal grade for 0 to 5 for AI. Zero is a non-tech product. One will have some decent code that can do some fuzzy stuff. Level Five can tell the difference between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump and 1 kilometre from hair alone.

Prediction 3: Ransomware

For those playing buzzword bingo, this should be an easy one this one. If you have already read that “Ransomware is going to get worse” then you can enter those articles into the “You Don’t Say” awards. That’s like saying that when you go see family “This year you may be passed some technology that someone got for Christmas and you may have to show them how to use it”. For sure Ransomware will continue, however, I expect that we might see in 2020 something amusing happen. e.g. they scour your data for images and use any faces in a deepfake video of you telling everyone “We Take Your Security Seriously”.

Prediction 4: Rockstars

Ah the wonderful world of Infosec Rockstars with their odd riders (things they ask conference organisers for) e.g. dressing rooms with Linux Wallpaper, a Nest camera so that they can talk to the Dark Web directly and my personal favourite of a bowl of black and white sweets that they have to re-order to create a joke in binary to amuse themselves. However, I digress in the minutiae. Watch out for new names this year on the circuit and some old ones fading away. The ‘regular’ faces will take a back stage seat while new faces will take the stage. These are the ones that got breached in 2019 trying to explain that it wasn’t their fault they got hacked, it was an underfunded department and “the skills gap”.

Prediction 5: Breaches

Look out for 2020 being the year that a breach occurs and the attacker feels so bad for how horrendous their security is that they actually fix the infrastructure, buy everyone a password manager and remove the any-any rules on the firewalls. They then remove all traces of the large security vendor who has installed their snake-oil empty code systems and secure the company with some simple tips. Or, look out for the breach where we all look and go … they knew what about us? Why were they holding on to that data?

Prediction 6: Social Media

Is 2020 going to be the year that Twitter will allow you within 5 minutes of putting a tweet out to make a one-time edit to a Tweet then it becomes locked … nah, I don’t think so either. Will it be the year that social media finally realises that we want to read our timelines in chronological order rather than the other they think it should go in. For those developers who think it should be the latter, I have a simple message for you “aggregated arrange data is I It it let me my of the the timeline want way you,” We can but wish!

Prediction 7: Cyber-pocalypse

OH, this is so painful to write … but unfortunately look at 2020 as being peak cyber-ish buzzword phrases as marketing departments the world over go mental at new shoe-horned phrases to scare the poor end user into freaking out about an issue that only affects one piece of technology that we thought everyone had moved off over a decade ago. For sure though, there are going to be plenty of people who are going to stand on stages this year and tell us that their piece of next-gen, level 4 AI, anti-APT, GDPR compliant security software will reduce the AI triangulation you needed whilst adding non-human agents to your SIEM whilst bringing an unprecedented visualisation of your underlying risk threat profile through a 3D virtual dashboard using proprietary VR technology that will be sent to Mars.

Prediction 8: Skills Gap

Due to the heavy handed adoption of IR35, the UK revenues legislation, businesses will be getting rid of IT contractors by the bus load in the lead up to April. Companies won’t be smart and will then try and hire these experts at a quarter of what they were on previously and then wonder why no-one took them up on the offers. Come June the current figure for the number of vacancies in the UK Infosec field (which currently stands at 289,000) will look like one of those charity totalisers! Each week I predict Ant and Dec will stand there in front of some giant screen looking like a CVE number and showing how the real skills gap in the UK in Infosec just hit 1,000,000 and we can all celebrate.

Prediction 9: DeepFakes

This is the year that we finally can say ‘Fake People’ and I believe it will come from a politician. To try and dodge some guilt they will deny everything and say it was a deep fake video. If you don’t know what a deep fake video is, watch Star Wars (the last one that came out that was actually quite good. Understand that Carrie Fisher is in fact dead but still in the movie. That’s a deep fake video. So spin that up to deep fake audio coupled with deep fake video and we’re going to have a real-world version of the Muppets as our favourite celebs and politicians get exposed doing all sorts of shenanigans. More worryingly, the world will start to look like the Matrix as we start to realise what is fake and what is real and that all of this is a simulation!

Prediction 10: Diversity

Oooooh go on, let’s see how close I can sail to the wind with this one! (Please note that this is not a factual opinion and one of comic standpoint to make the reader think wider about the issues). 2020 will finally be the year where we scrap diversity as meaning ‘we need more women in cyber’. It will be a singular moment where someone realises that diversity is more than what’s in your pants and that in fact, diversity means “broad spectrum of backgrounds, socio, economic, emotional, biological, mental” and it will happen when Max Headroom will take over the airwaves and declare itself sentient and that all objects should be counted and robots, toasters, fridges and AI have been discriminated against for decades unfairly. We then realise that we are all diverse in our own way and claiming female and male imbalances is actually just two ways to slice the cherry and we missed out on non-binaries, trans, disabled, gay, religious diversity … can you name an Infosec Rockstar who is a Jedi? I think I just about got away with that one …

And there we have it, 2020 will see the return of Government leaflets, Max Headroom, more failed CISOs on stage and fake humans, what a joyous year this is going to be. So now you have read this blog, go into your email and change your password, enable two-factor-authentication and then tell a colleague to do the same.

What predictions do you think I missed? Do you think the list looks right? Leave a comment below and get in touch if you have your own thoughts on Predictions for 2020 !

Happy New Year !!

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