6 Predictions About Cybersecurity Challenges in 2024

Cybersecurity issues and challenges are predicted to increase during 2024 for companies, organisations, and governments as new technology makes it harder to distinguish truth from scams.

Cybersecurity issues and challenges will continue to provide fodder next year for crisis-related situations for companies, organisations, and governments. That’s according to the observations and predictions of cyber experts and observers.

‘Uptick in Disruptive Hacktivism’

“Everyone should be prepared for global activity around the myriad major events being held throughout 2024, including the U.S., European Parliament and other elections, as well as the Summer Olympics in Paris,” according to Google Cloud’s Cybersecurity Forecast report for 2024,

“Additionally, as major global conflicts continue into next year, be prepared for an uptick in disruptive hacktivism."

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving, sometimes in new and unexpected ways. Defenders, often with limited resources, have the monumental task of keeping up,” the report warns.

Election Interference

According to Shivajee Samdarshi, chief product officer at Venafi, the widespread adoption of generative AI is likely to supercharge election interference in 2024.

“From the creation of convincing deepfakes to an increase of targeted misinformation, the concept of trust, identity and democracy itself will be under the microscope,” he said via email. “This will put [an] even greater onus on individuals to scrutinise and make informed decisions and on media platforms to root out false content.”

More Targeted Attacks

Cybersecurity issues and challenges will continue to provide fodder next year for crisis-related situations for companies, organisations, and governments.

“The nature of cyberattacks is becoming more targeted, focusing on specific digital infrastructures of individual companies,” Nenad Zaric, CEO and cofounder of cybersecurity firm Trickest, said in an email. “This requires a bespoke approach to cybersecurity, moving from generic solutions to more tailored strategies that can address unique vulnerabilities and threats. In a world at war, malicious actors are increasingly targeting the critical infrastructure of companies and even countries.”

Moreover, he added that those tasks are challenging and can’t be addressed with traditional approaches and using traditional products. “Instead, they require bespoke automation and strategies,” he said.

Fooling Users

“Hackers will likely use AI to analyse vast amounts of data and launch targeted attacks,” Stefan Schiller, a vulnerability researcher at Sonar, said via email. “AI-driven phishing attackers capable of generating highly convincing and personalised messages, which trick users into revealing sensitive information, may increase.”

He warned that AI-powered malware could, like a virus – think COVID-19 – adapt and evolve in real-time, which would make it more challenging for traditional anti-malware detection systems to keep up.

Leveraging AI Tools

Emerging threats “where monitoring for and detecting cyber threats will increasingly become a ‘fool’s errand’ where it will be impossible to distinguish between what good and bad looks like,” Peter M. Tran, the head of global cyber infrastructure and product security solutions at InferSight, said via email.

“This is a direct result of the commercial use of AI tools across most all major business operating functions to gain efficiencies while at the same time, cyber attackers are leveraging the same AI tools to generate attack techniques and tactics that can ‘deep fake’ current cybersecurity defences,” he pointed out.

‘New Avenues For Cybercrime’

“Cybersecurity is only going to become a more difficult field,” Rob Price, director of field security at Snow Software, said in an emailed message.

“AI has created new avenues for cybercrime, and proactive vigilance against attacks will become an increasingly important priority,” he pointed out. “This will be especially difficult [because] we are going to continue to see a lack of security personnel and manpower required to fulfil some of the functions of cybersecurity management... this shortage has the potential to grow.”