By Shambhulingayya Aralelemath, Associate Vice President and Global Delivery Head, Cyber Security, Infosys
As we approach 2024, enterprises must prepare for new and renewed cyberattacks that aim to impact the core of digital trust across businesses segments. Here are some key trends that will influence how businesses approach security in 2024.
Impact of AI on threat landscape: AI-related threats will increase as AI continues to augment human threat actors with new capabilities and helps autonomous threat actors evolve to execute end-to-end cyberattacks. AI will strengthen existing attack vectors, such as phishing and manifest new ones, such as deepfakes.
Digital trust with quantum-safe cryptography: The emergence of quantum computing will render the current cryptographic algorithms ineffective. Cybercriminals will find ways to steal encrypted data that can be decrypted later with the help of quantum computing, putting valuable IPs at risk of malicious exposure. Enterprises will focus on strengthening digital trust by adopting multi-fold risk management strategies, including, evaluation of quantum-related risks and protection of information assets against quantum-related attacks.
Strengthen cyber resilience: Enterprises have long strategised to protect against new attack vectors that arise when adopting zero trust principles. However, as attack surfaces continue to expand, there will be increased focus on making businesses resilient to cyberattacks. For example, ransomware has been a persistent and continuously evolving threat, and it continues to impact core business functions in an enterprise. The impact of cyberattack-induced business disruptions has brought focus on adopting processes, standards, and technologies to strengthen cyber resilience. Boardrooms are expected to prioritise initiatives that integrate cyber resilience with the overall resilience framework.
Effect of regulations and standards: The impact of cybersecurity on businesses and society is getting pronounced and has gained universal attention from government agencies and regulatory bodies. This will lead to the adoption of new regulations and standards, as legal frameworks continue to catch up with the technology innovations. For example, the NIS2 directive and the 2023 EU-wide legislation on cybersecurity will require enterprises to strengthen their cybersecurity and report security incidents.
Rise in insider threat: Across enterprises, the impact of insider threats is becoming a pronounced concern. This becomes even more profound as enterprises grant elevated access to partners, third-party vendors, and others. Businesses are expected to adopt solutions, such as identity threat detection and response, for monitoring and prompt identification of insider threats.
Focused attacks on cloud ecosystems: With the adoption of multi-cloud environments and cloud services, the threat actors will adopt new strategies to exploit misconfigurations and gain unauthorized access to cloud ecosystems. The shared responsibility model, along with secure-by-design principles, will guide the cybersecurity reference architecture for the secure adoption of the cloud.
Addressing cyber skills shortage: The lack of talent who specialize in cybersecurity to address the security challenges arising out of technology advancements will continue to be a concern. Multiple strategies, including leveraging AI-augmented capabilities, will be required to skill up talents for protection and response readiness against advanced cyber threats. Enterprises will also prioritize adoption of platform-based security solutions and consolidation of technology partners to alleviate the need for heterogeneous skills across disparate tools and technology standards.
In summary, 2024 will witness an increase in cyber threats. AI will become far more immersive and shall drive strategy for safeguarding of individual, enterprise, social, and government-related digital initiatives.