A survey of emerging threats in cybersecurity

• A comprehensive overview of existing security vulnerabilities.
• Critical analysis of the state-of-the-art mitigation techniques and their pros and cons.
• Analysis of new cyber attack patterns in emerging technologies.
• Potential future research directions in cyber security.

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.