Cyber security leaders confront an extensive landscape of threats, ever-expanding technology infrastructures, and limited budgets. As the new year starts, it's a chance to identify the major security risks and find ways to better protect ourselves.
Just like in other areas of business and technology, artificial intelligence (AI) will significantly change offence and defence. It will influence some, if not all, of the cybersecurity threat trends discussed here.
Social engineering attacks, which involve tricking users into giving unauthorised system access, are getting more sophisticated. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT enable attackers to use smarter, personalised methods, and deepfake attacks are becoming more frequent.
We need to boost awareness and education across organisations in 2024 and notice the importance of AI.
The main idea of zero trust is to continually check and adjust as systems become more complex, making security a vital part of the business strategy. Zero trust challenges the assumption of a safe network perimeter.
As the threat landscape evolves, this idea extends to include remote workers, partner organisations, and IoT devices, not just the corporate network.
By 2024, zero trust will become more advanced and comprehensive with AI authentication and real-time monitoring.
The IT landscape continues to see cloud migration as a prominent trend.
As more businesses embrace a cloud-first approach, cybercriminals are actively looking for chances to attack hybrid and multi-cloud systems.
In 2023, Mandiant, an American cyber security company, observed that threat actors concentrated on cloud environments, aiming to maintain access and move within them, as mentioned in Google Cloud's Cyber security Forecast for 2024.
Ransomware is still profitable for hackers, and they will keep looking for weaknesses to launch these attacks. Useckas highlights that these attacks show no signs of abating, and there is a growing trend of simultaneous dual ransomware attacks.
Implementing generative AI tools will enable cybercriminals to create highly convincing emails and phone calls, making it more challenging to detect social engineering campaigns.
With mobile devices now playing a more significant role in remote work, financial transactions, and personal communications, they have become attractive targets for cyber threats. This situation underscores the crucial need for strong, effective mobile security solutions in 2024.
It is predicted that more people will invest in cybersecurity apps for their phones to add an extra layer of protection for themselves. The increasing use of VPNs on handheld devices is also expected to rise as a countermeasure against the threat hackers will have on mobiles.
Human risk management aims to assist organisations in pinpointing employees with the highest risk scores, enabling them to develop more tailored security mitigation programs.
In 2024, there is expected to be more emphasis on this to ensure all employees feel confident about being resilient to cyber security threats that they may encounter, like phishing emails.
For more information on our human risk management services we have a page dedicated to this on our website here
Data stolen and available on the dark web is more accessible, and the increase in precise spear-phishing attacks will help cybercriminals build detailed profiles of their victims. By doing so, they can establish entire identities for committing fraud without getting caught.
It is predicted that we will start to see more detailed attacks that piece together people's information more effectively to make them way more targeted, which will be more likely for high-profile targets.
Cyber security threats will be more advanced than ever in 2024, so it is essential to be prepared now more than ever with emerging technologies such as AI.
Here at Silver Lining, we can help combat this threat with our cybersecurity management systems to keep your business and employees resilient against any new threat. Find out more below.
