Predicted themes include an emphasis on developing a security culture, the use of social media scams as a new social engineering battlefield, catastrophic attacks on vital infrastructure, reputation-damaging deep fakes, and an increase in attack surface.
The world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform provider, KnowBe4, today released its team of industry experts’ forecasts for the state of cybersecurity in 2023.
An increase in devastating strikes on important infrastructure
Additionally, a significant outage is expected to happen as a result of essential infrastructure being hacked, particularly in light of the continuing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine. This might have societal and economic repercussions for a sizable population, or perhaps an entire country. It’s possible that people would engage in digital civil disobedience by attacking their own national infrastructure or government websites as a means of protest in response to the global recession and rising expense of living.
A surge in social media frauds is said to represent a new field of social engineering combat.
Scams on social media will proliferate, endangering friends, family, organizations, and coworkers. People will be relying more on indicators of trust, like how many connections an account has and how long the account has been active, as the social media commerce and marketplace industries continue to expand, making them more vulnerable to scams that use stolen social media accounts to deceive people and businesses. Scammers will undoubtedly profit from the fact that official verification is now available for a little cost on a variety of platforms.
A change in emphasis toward establishing a security culture across enterprises worldwide
Most businesses now recognize the importance of security awareness training, and many are beginning to shift their focus from training alone to including behavior and culture. Building a robust security culture that has the backing of leaders and the entire staff base has gained positive momentum on a worldwide scale.
Deepfake assaults that are dangerous will be more convincing and harm reputations.
Deepfakes are a risky method of gaining someone’s trust by getting them to take their words and actions at face value in front of gullible individuals. Organizations do not yet adequately teach their personnel on the subject because they lack a thorough awareness of the risks this can pose to their reputation.
The Metaverse’s increased attack surface brings new dangers.
It is getting harder to fully secure enterprises all around the world since there are more danger vectors, which leads to a bigger attack surface. Cybercriminals now have additional options to launch assaults thanks to the growth of the Metaverse.
“This list of predictions in cybersecurity trends has been gathered from our global group of experts who have decades of experience in the cybersecurity field,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO, KnowBe4. “They are at the forefront of what is happening in the industry, constantly following trends and staying up to date on the latest threats, tools and techniques. Many of them noted a fundamental shift in focus for organizations beyond security awareness training alone to striving for a strong security culture that is driven by measurable behavioral change. Also, social engineering will continue to dominate as an overwhelmingly successful method for cybercriminals to execute attacks.”
