2024 will be the most difficult cyber year on record for the public, businesses, non-profits, and governments as cybercriminals continue to use increasingly sophisticated technology including artificial intelligence (AI) to plan well-funded, asymmetric cyberattacks against online infrastructure. As 2023 saw the upward trend in the size of payouts continue, cybercriminals will no doubt push to keep the size of ransomware paydays growing. Imposter frauds of all kinds against the general public and businesses will continue to increase alongside business email compromise, identity theft, crypto fraud, and other damaging cyber tactics. Deepfakes leveraging AI will be an emerging wildcard, and we are already seeing fake kidnapping, ransoms, and money-wiring scenarios being perpetrated with increasing frequency.
Additionally, cyberactivism will become an increasingly prominent issue as more online users become highly “social justice-driven.” Antagonistic parties are looking more and more to cyberattacks as a means of wreaking damage and chaos comparable to that of a physical strike; we have already seen massive denial-of-service attacks on media and institutions, and the rise of cyberactivism is likely to only accelerate the frequency of such incidents.
Spillover from regional wars is also likely as proxy adversaries strike critical infrastructure to disrupt the existing global order. Security experts are concerned about the potential fallout of a security breach at a significant AI organization, as the potential societal and financial damages are too vast to estimate.
One of the factors exacerbating this abundance of risk is the insufficient public awareness surrounding the dangers of cyberattacks and how fraught our digital infrastructure is. We are collectively clinging to the same set of vulnerable tools that were designed to maximize commerce rather than emphasize security: this includes email accounts, texting platforms, social media messengers, as well as social media itself, all of which continue to be entry points for malevolent actors to conduct damaging attacks. Big businesses are in a much better posture to protect their assets and information, but they are facing determined adversaries who only need to identify a single weak spot in order to gain entry.
As cybercriminals become more brazen than ever, 2024 will almost certainly have historic levels of damages arise out of cybercrime. With cyber technology being increasingly weaponized against the predominantly unarmed public and with cybercrime on track to becoming the world’s third-largest economy behind the U.S. and China by 2025, larger groups like businesses, non-profits, and government entities should all be taking more proactive defensive measures.
Next we will take a look at what to expect in Ransomware for 2024.
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