A Survey of Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity

The exponential growth of the Internet interconnections has led to a significant growth of cyber attack incidents often with disastrous and grievous consequences. Malware is the primary choice of weapon to carry out malicious intents in the cyberspace, either by exploitation into existing vulnerabilities or utilization of unique characteristics of emerging technologies. The development of more innovative and effective malware defense mechanisms has been regarded as an urgent requirement in the cybersecurity community. To assist in achieving this goal, we first present an overview of the most exploited vulnerabilities in existing hardware, software, and network layers. This is followed by critiques of existing state-of-the-art mitigation techniques as why they do or don’t work. We then discuss new attack patterns in emerging technologies such as social media, cloud computing, smartphone technology, and critical infrastructure. Finally, we describe our speculative observations on future research directions.