CISOs don't need a crystal ball - they already know that 2024 will be another tough year, especially with AI at everyone's mind.
CISOs will be employing AI and automation to safeguard against increasingly complex data threats, themselves driven by AI-enabled cybercrime-as-a-service and persistent nation-state driven threats.
Automation within digital operations will become a critical game changer as it supports incident responders in making the right decision, quickly, while under pressure.
The right automation tooling will revolutionize security processes and reduce the amount of human error in reacting to new IT incidents at pace and at scale in the new year.
Here are some of the risks and opportunities CISOs can expect to manage over the course of 2024.
Big incidents will be BIG. High-visibility attacks will continue to be rare, but when they occur, they will be major news, with massive implications for customers and even wider society, depending on the organization affected.
These types of attacks will require a much higher level of maturity on the defender's side to prevent, detect and recover from.
Due to the increased effectiveness of AI-driven phishing attacks and conflicting goals, customer support teams will be more in the line of fire as a target for compromise as the first step in a broader data compromise/ransomware attack.
Social media scams will soon be made that much smarter through AI-driven presentation and language personalization - not to mention easier and cheaper for attackers to launch, manage, and tailor.
The sophistication and quality of AI-driven social media attacks will make its way into the phishing world and will allow bad actors to extend their spear phishing techniques to anyone, not just the senior executives.
This will allow sophisticated attacks against lower-level employees, and we'll likely see them become the primary target of land-and-expand APT attacks.
As we come to terms with the impact of work from anywhere, and the difficulty in addressing AI-enhanced phishing attacks, the endpoint becomes once again front and center as a technical control point.
Those organizations with the best trust management awareness of their security and regulatory compliance status will be well positioned to move faster with sales, acquisitions, and reporting.
Cyber insurance will continue to be a tax without a pay-off.
Cyber insurance continues to be hard to get, harder to retain and bears an unclear ROI. Large organizations will aim to keep it because of their contractual obligations, but it will offer a small return on investment.
Rather than seeing cyber insurers step up to the plate to provide effective guidance on security controls to protect a company, we will continue to rely on guidance from DHS/CISA, GCHQ/NCSC and other trusted government agencies with oversight and mandates for national and global cybersecurity.
As widespread AI-driven hiring scams - either fake companies masquerading as real ones, or with AI masquerading as potential employees - continue, we will see a resurgence of the identity-proofing concerns and solutions that industry struggled with in the early 2000s.
CISOs will continue to struggle with growing responsibilities.
Expect more studies and examples of CISOs leaving their roles because of stress, fatigue and mental and physical health issues.
Even with continued calls for a seat at the table, and the focus of the SEC on a company's cybersecurity risk, the model of CISO as accountable for everything and responsible for nothing will continue and will put companies at risk unless they change their roles and responsibilities.
This Cyber News was published on www.helpnetsecurity.com. Publication date: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 06:13:05 +0000