Skip main navigation

New offer! Get 30% off your first 2 months of Unlimited Monthly. Start your subscription for just £35.99 £24.99. New subscribers only T&Cs apply

Find out more

Challenges of the future

What are the current major challenges in ethical hacking and how are they going to change in the near future?
11.5
Ethical hacking at the moment or cybersecurity is like a massive growth industry at the moment in terms of ethical hacking there’s a lot of new areas like opening up specifically around Internet of things devices so at the moment there’s no security controls like implemented with them so you might have your watch, your fridge all this stuff there’s like now getting connected to the Internet the security around that in the future is gonna be like huge typically like a lot of vendors at the moment they don’t really want to spend the extra money like implementing security with this so a lot of research going into like yeah security around this area and there’s quite a few like stories about like IOT devices getting hacked and there was one that was an IOT connected fish tank in a casino so someone like hacked into the fish tank like go on to their internal network another like area where it might be sort of heading is like cloud infrastructure people hosting like everything in the cloud nowadays instead of like locally that’s gonna be like a big area moving forward I think yeah going on that as well kind of make our job a bit harder because everybody uses something like Amazon AWS or cloud infrastructure then it’s already been made a lot more secured by Amazon or by others providing it so sometimes it can make our job a little harder than if it was running off a server in some guys flat that he doesn’t really pay much attention to and I think that will probably be a bit more of a move towards artificial intelligence and machine learning but more like on the research side of things or maybe on the defensive side of things rather than the hacking part and more than in part at the minute a lot of sort of end point security systems there’s things called the carbon black they look for signatures of different malwares and things like that but what people are trying to do is train it to look for any sort of behavior that might be suspicious or malicious like for example if you inject into a process and windows and then use that to spawn yourself a shell so something you can use to interact with the system that’s very easily track that something new started here and then it spawned this command window but if you you know do that seven or eight at times over it becomes a lot harder to track they want to introduce you know machine learning to be able to follow these patterns and identify malicious activity and that work before it can kind of identify itself as malicious so before it does something bad they want to be able to say this thing might be about to do something bad.

Digital systems are being introduced in almost every part of our lives. In our homes, our businesses, national infrastructures and so on.

Every new environment provides its own security challenges and new technologies. The number of people, organisations, and even countries looking to compromise our systems or obtain our data is growing. Their skill and capabilities are growing too.

Your task

Watch the video above, where Sam and Kyle discuss how things in the sector are changing, and what challenges they think they might be facing soon.
Based on this, and your own ideas, what do you think are the current major challenges in ethical hacking, and how are they going to change in the near future?
Post your thoughts on this question in the comments and see what your fellow learners think.
This article is from the free online

Ethical Hacking: An Introduction

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life

Reach your personal and professional goals

Unlock access to hundreds of expert online courses and degrees from top universities and educators to gain accredited qualifications and professional CV-building certificates.

Join over 18 million learners to launch, switch or build upon your career, all at your own pace, across a wide range of topic areas.

Start Learning now