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In a recent insightful discussion with Morten, CEO of Heimdal®, we explored the key cybersecurity trends for 2024.
From the evolving tactics of cybercriminals to the future of cybersecurity defenses, here’s what we learned.
Key Takeaways:
- Cybercriminals are now operating with sophisticated business structures.
- Email security vulnerabilities remain a significant concern.
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are increasingly becoming targets for cyber attacks.
- Collaboration and advanced cybersecurity tools are essential in combating cyber threats.
- A new generation of tech-savvy professionals is emerging to strengthen cybersecurity.
- The cybersecurity industry is moving towards more comprehensive and user-friendly solutions.
- Future challenges include complex, high-impact cyber attacks and leveraging trusted platforms for attacks.
Cybercrime’s Evolving Business Model
Cybercriminals have transformed their operations, adopting business-like structures.
This shift includes organized teams for marketing, content creation, and recruitment, making their attacks more sophisticated and targeted.
The focus on exploiting email security vulnerabilities, such as inadequate DMARC and TLS configurations, has made businesses increasingly vulnerable to targeted spam and phishing campaigns.
The Rising Threat to Supply Chains
The dependency on Managed Service Providers has grown, but so has the risk of supply chain attacks.
This trend stems from the increasing complexity of technology, which often surpasses the average user’s technical knowledge.
Cybercriminals view MSPs as high-value targets, as breaching an MSP can provide access to all their clients.
Strategies for Combating Cyber Threats
To combat these evolving cyber risks, collaboration among global law enforcement agencies, such as Europol, and state-backed initiatives is crucial.
Additionally, MSPs and businesses must integrate advanced cybersecurity tools and unified platforms to manage threats more effectively, ensuring a robust defense against cyber attacks.
Positive Developments in Cybersecurity
Despite the challenges, there are positive trends. A new generation of tech-savvy individuals is entering the workforce, promising to fill the IT resource gap.
Moreover, MSPs are improving their offerings, providing more comprehensive and user-friendly cybersecurity solutions, which is a step towards simplifying cybersecurity management for businesses.
Preparing for Future Cybersecurity Challenges
Looking ahead, we must prepare for more complex cyber attacks.
Cybercriminals might leverage trusted platforms like email marketing tools for large-scale attacks.
Additionally, the potential for dramatic, high-profile attacks, such as targeting space missions, highlights the need for constant vigilance and innovation in cybersecurity strategies.
Heading into 2024
Our discussion with Morten highlights the importance of staying informed and proactive in the face of evolving cybersecurity challenges.
As we head into 2024, it’s clear that understanding these trends and adapting our strategies accordingly will be crucial for businesses and cybersecurity professionals.
What Happened Last Year? Top Cybersecurity Trends of 2023
From the Customer Side:
1. The Death of Point Solutions Is Coming – Unification is the Future
CISOs and other decision-makers place a strong emphasis on centralized architectures that provide prevention, detection, and mitigation under a single roof in order to increase visibility and efficiency.
With outdated point solutions created in a time when the cyber security landscape didn’t present as many threats and a talent shortage, organizations will keep turning to centralized solutions to meet the high demands of the IT threat landscape.
2. The Focus on Automation and Visibility Tools Will Increase
Automation is here to stay. The causes are numerous and really quite easy to grasp. Security systems generate almost infinite amounts of data, which no team could handle in real-time and react to in a timely manner. Moreover, hackers are using automation too!
To move from reactive to proactive security and regain control over one’s environment and schedule, analytics, intelligence, and automation are essential.
In the corporate IT environment, security automation can identify potential threats, assess the event to determine whether it is real or fake, and then contain and eliminate the threat. Without human assistance, automated security tools complete these actions in a matter of seconds.
Cybersecurity automation minimizes security teams’ alert fatigue by examining alerts, identifying threats, and reducing the effects of attacks.
3. A Radical Change is Coming! How You Visualize Threats and Action Response Will Be Redefined with Heimdal®’s Revolutionary Industry-agnostic Platform
With this addition to the lineup, Heimdal® is creating a new category in the cybersecurity market by providing a new approach to Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology and engineering.
Heimdal®’s Threat-hunting & Action Center was developed in response to an ever-changing threat environment where IT teams’ time and resources were being stretched thin across a huge spectrum of priorities.
The platform solves the need for a plethora of solutions that end up creating a slow and inefficient environment by combining everything into a single unified, integrated, and AI-driven solution that will forever change the way you think about cybersecurity.
From the Attackers’ Side:
4. MSPs are the Prime Supply-Chain Target for a Multi-tiered Attack Surface
In line with last year’s prediction, supply chain attacks will increase in 2023. Attacks on the software supply chain take place when a malicious actor gains access to an MSP or a software vendor’s network and compromises the software before the vendor distributes it to customers. The sharp rise in software supply chain attacks is partly due to the accelerated business climate, which has resulted in less time for MSPs to react and rapid software release cycles from vendors, leaving developers with less time to identify and address security flaws.
With the rapid increase in IT outsourcing, MSPs in particular are a ripe target for cybercriminals.
This leads, naturally, to a multi-tiered attack surface, that can severely compromise customer data and IT systems. Attacks on the software supply chain increased by more than 300% in 2021 compared to 2020, and it will increase even more in 2023.
The fact that NIST has released a thorough guide on how institutions can defend themselves against supply chain attacks and compromise and the numerous 2022 news (see details about US newspapers, Oktapus, Comm100 Live Chat application) regarding supply chain attacks are clear signs of how serious this threat is.
5. Consumers Get Entangled in the Web of Ransomware
Cybercriminals will successfully compromise internet-based software delivery services, such as Steam, Halo, Blizzard or others, to deliver a hypercomplex ransomware attack through system rights provided by the services.
Supply chain attacks will therefore no longer be just B2B-based, but expand the attack sphere into the consumer space for a mass-based exploit-to-ransomware payout attack.
6. Attackers Will Get Bolder and Will Spend More to Complete Their Strategical Objectives
Cybersecurity criminals have plenty of time and plenty of resources to complete their attacks and therefore they will surgically target big institutions to find a way through their defenses.
Attacks of this caliber will typically run into tens of thousands of dollars per month, as cybercriminals use resources in less developed countries, or could be state-backed from North Korea, Russia, China, Iran or similar.
They will need to be numerous because even for orchestrated attacks, success is never guaranteed, but when the reward is in the tens of millions of dollars, the cost becomes insignificant.
7. Strategical Focus on Infrastructure across Europe and the US
Transport, energy, and other examples of critical infrastructure are becoming more complex and dependent on networks of interconnected devices. Therefore, unsurprisingly, a major concern today is the critical infrastructure’s susceptibility to technical failures and cyberattacks.
State and non-state actors now have more technical know-how, motivations, and financial resources than ever before to destabilize a nation’s vital infrastructure.
An attack on vital infrastructure in one region of a nation can have a significant negative impact on many others – the most recent cyberattack on DSB demonstrated exactly how an online threat on a third-party IT service provider can cause serious disruption in the real world.
8. Cyberespionage and Information Operations Will Rise
Information operations and cyberespionage will likely increase. Iran, China, and Russia, the usual actors in information operations, will probably continue to promote narratives that best serve their objectives.
Additionally, they will highlight the idea that the United States failed to honor its obligations to international organizations and nations.
We can already see that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is partially supported by a cyber strategy that entails at least three separate, occasionally coordinated processes: destructive cyberattacks inside Ukraine, network penetration and espionage in other states, and cyber-influence operations aimed at people all over the world.
9. Deepfakes will become increasingly dangerous
Deepfake technology manipulates existing or brand-new audio and video content using artificial intelligence techniques. Although it can be used for legitimate purposes — satire and gaming, for example —, it can also, just like everything else, be misused by malicious actors for malicious purposes.
Deepfakes are used to fabricate a story that seems to come from reliable sources. The two main threats are against civil society (disseminating false information to influence public opinion in a particular direction) and against people or businesses so that malicious actors can make a profit.
Deepfakes pose a significant cybersecurity threat to businesses because they could make phishing and BEC attacks more successful, make identity fraud much simpler, and significantly reduce share value by twisting brand reputation.
Heimdal®’s Predictions for 2022 – Brief Overview
1. Supply Chain Attacks – Ransomware Especially – Will Keep Their Title as the Biggest Threat for Any Company on the Globe
As Scott Sayce, Global Head of Cyber at AGCS, mentions,
The cost of ransomware attacks has increased as criminals have targeted larger companies, critical infrastructure, and supply chains. Criminals have honed their tactics to extort more money. Double and triple extortion attacks are now the norm – besides the encryption of systems, sensitive data is increasingly stolen and used as leverage for extortion demands to business partners, suppliers, or customers.
Intermittent or partial encryption is a relatively new technique that allows threat actors to avoid detection and corrupt victims’ files faster.
Intermittent encryption has recently become increasingly popular among ransomware operators, who extensively promote the functionality in order to attract clients or partners.
In a double extortion ransomware attack, the data is first exfiltrated, then encrypted, so if the victims refuse to pay the ransom, it will be leaked online or even sold to the highest bidder. Maze, Egregor, Sodinokibi, and Nefilim are just a few examples of ransomware whose operators use(d) this tactic.
In a triple extortion ransomware attack, criminals demand money not only from the first target organization but also from anyone who might be endangered if that organization’s data is made public. Other attacks may be launched against the initial target if they refuse to pay the ransom.
2. Remote Work Challenges Will Keep Accelerating at a Whirling Rate
Since the pandemic started and employees began working remotely, the vast majority of businesses have seen a significant increase in cyberattacks.
According to GAT Labs, 66% of security breaches are the result of employee negligence or malicious behavior, whereas 82% of employers report a deficiency of cybersecurity skills.
3. Data Protection Will Have a Massive Impact on Authentication Evolution
Current trends indicate that the future is actually passwordless, with passwords being replaced by authentication methods that use Knowledge Factors (something you know), Possession Factors (something you own), and Biometric Factors (something you are).
4. Machine-Learning and Artificial Intelligence Will Be Real Game Changers in the Evolution towards Prevention Instead of Mitigation
AI and machine learning play a major role in making cybersecurity solutions more effective and more practical, helping companies anticipate threats and actually respond to them in real-time. The alert-to-response ratio can easily overwhelm many in-house security teams as cyber expertise declines.
Utilizing AI enables overloaded teams to scale up security services and automate and coordinate advanced response actions.
5. Real-Time Data Visibility Will Be Elementary for Any Cybersecurity Software
As is the case of automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, real-time data visibility has begun to be a core component of any good cybersecurity solution on the market.
Presently, a large number of cybersecurity firms that provide real-time data solutions transfer the information they have gathered onto maps that change as the situation does.
Some of them display the frequency of various types of cyberattacks by geographic location. Some disclose the locations of servers that are used to carry out cybercrimes.
Heimdal® as well has been enhancing real-time data visibility within a new product that will be added to our portfolio, which will empower security leaders and teams with an advanced threat-centric view of their entire IT landscape.
6. Cybersecurity Awareness Will Have Fantastic Growth among Both Home Users and Professionals
Having an idea about what could go wrong in terms of cybersecurity and being curious about what can be done to avoid problems are the first steps of prevention.
Among employees, cybersecurity awareness training significantly reduces the risk of becoming the target for phishing and ransomware attacks, and it has proven to be essential for any powerful cybersecurity strategy.
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Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.
Thanks, Sharath! Visit https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/ddos-attack-distributed-denial-of-service/ for more details about DDoS attacks prevention (for which you’ll need a layered approach with advanced intrusion prevention, threat management, firewalls, VPN, anti-spam, anti-phishing and content filtering solutions) and some services we recommend!
Thanks Morten for these noteworthy points in Cyber security! It was of great help. Coming to reducing the cyber risks can you suggest a few services like Mazebolt to help minimize DDoS attacks?