The risk and severity of cyber-attacks have clearly grown over the past few years. In fact, since the year 2018, mankind has witnessed the most horrific cases of cybercrimes related to massive data breaches, flaws in microchips, cryptojacking, and many others.

Cloud Vulnerability
The Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2019 reveals that cloud vulnerability is and will continue to be one of the biggest cyber security challenges faced by organizations. This is because enterprises are leveraging cloud applications and storing sensitive data related to their employees and business operations on the cloud.

Machine Learning Poisoning

If a hacker targets a machine learning model and injects instructions into it, the system becomes vulnerable to attacks. Machine learning models typically use data that is crowd-sourced or taken from social media. They also exploit user-generated information such as satisfaction ratings, purchasing histories, or web traffic. Cybercriminals engaging in MI poisoning could potentially use malicious samples or introduce backdoors or Trojans to poison training sets and compromise the system.

Smart Contract Hacking

Though smart contracts are in their early stages of development, businesses are using them to execute some form of digital asset exchange or the other. In fact, it’s smart contracts that make Ethereum famous.

Smart contracts are software programs that carry self-executing code. This code enables developers to create the rules and processes that build a blockchain-based application. Consequently, these contracts are a prime target of online criminals looking to compromise such applications. Moreover, since it’s a brand new field, technologists are just about getting to know how to design them and security researchers are still finding bugs in some of them. These vulnerabilities make it easy for criminals to hack the contracts.

As this technology continues to mature, smart contract hacking will pose a significant threat to businesses in 2020 and beyond.