As we begin 2023, this year will be remembered as the year when cybersecurity strategies and procedures against escalating cyber threats becomes ever more challenging. No longer are organizations scrambling to stabilize their operations amid the disruption caused by the impact of the pandemic, but for all this talk of the “new normal,” the world has yet to fully get back to the pre-pandemic environment. Additionally, the resulting accelerated transition of company assets to digital environments has led to increasingly complex digital cloud ecosystem that will provide the ideal environment for bad actors looking to breach any unprepared organizational cybersecurity environment.
As enterprises expand their business and with it, their cloud ecosystem – it’s imperative that they don’t lose sight of the human part on both sides of a cyberattack: Many workforces have now adjusted to hybrid work environment, but obscuring the lines between on-site and at-home work will require security teams to do away with conventional point solution-based strategies if they are to stay on top of any potential entry points for opportunistic hackers. It will be important for the senior management to maintain a macro view of their digital infrastructure with a more comprehensive approach to security. Emerging cyber threats in 2023 will be ones that resonate with a variety of stakeholders that include security teams, organizational management, regulators, and end consumers. Companies’ senior management teams will find themselves caught in the push-and-pull of governmental entities calling for more regulations in data security and a global economy on the verge of a recession that is sure to make funding threat prevention and response a challenge
The coming year will also be a time when enterprises and end-users re-evaluate that which not too long ago seemed like they would become transformative innovations: By 2023, the shine will have worn off the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but the blockchain that powers them will be a key target for hackers. Also, general public trust in open-source software remains questionable, as more cyber attackers continue to hack opensource flaws, leaving developers in quite a dilemma of development approach. Additionally, vulnerabilities that rocked the cybersecurity industry, like Log4Shell, may be in the recent past, but still resonate with government regulators and businesses worrying about future open-source concerns.
Malicious hackers will withstand this period of uncertainty by striking at old, but dependable, targets instead of taking big risks that promise bigger payouts. They will revisit the outdated security protocols, software, and devices that enterprises should have upgraded long ago and treat them as fresh attack weak links in their security ecosystem. Businesses should also be on the lookout for familiar threats in innovative approaches, as attackers fall back on tried-and-true tactics.
The rising complexity of social engineering frauds, with their proven history of exploiting a wide array of users – the weakest link in any security chain and will continue into 2023, as bad actors incorporate novel technologies like deepfakes in their schemes to stack the odds in their favor. Similarly, expect more cyber threats to adapt old-school techniques into living off the cloud attacks that will enable them to seize legitimate tools and services as part of their hacking strategy.
Overall cybercriminals will be spending 2023 continuously fine-tuning their hacking methods in a more professional operation. Better-armed security teams and government agencies clamping down on crime will finally push beleaguered ransomware actors into regrouping and refining their cyber hacking strategies and approaches.
Enterprises can regard the incoming year as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for forward-looking cybersecurity countermeasures that can reduce the overall risk factors of cyberattacks.
Ransomware Threats Will Continue and Adapt to New Cyber Security Countermeasures
Ransomware cybercriminals are expected to continue with their tactics, but also pivoting to a new cyber threat model. To reinforce their operations, they will seek out new paths that will allow them to still put their skill sets to use. More established ransomware criminal entities which have entire hacking teams at their disposal and for whom data encryption is but one step in their attacks will be forced to innovate in the face of these changing times.
Some cyber security experts predict that some cyber criminals will do away with encryption altogether and focus instead on the data monetization, robbing infected systems for valuable data like credit card details to sell it off themselves. It is projected that others will pursue a different direction and reinvent themselves into purely extortion groups, a strategic move that will allow them to repurpose their attacks and maintain the same kill chain but forgo the ransomware payload. It will not be a total change of tactics for groups to dedicate themselves fully to this business model, as evidenced by the likes of Conti that already have their own data extortion arms. While it is a departure from the ransomware standard approach, extorting their victims directly will still bag criminals a tidy profit without drawing unwanted attention from the media and law enforcement.
Another way ransomware actors may adapt is by turning their attention to the cloud. With more companies migrating their assets and critical data to the cloud, and Gartner projecting that worldwide spending on public cloud services will reach up to US$592 billion in the coming year, the criminal cyber groups will have little recourse but to follow cloud adopters if ransomware operations are to stay profitable. Cloud environments have typically been spared from such attacks owing to the significant differences between cloud and onpremises IT infrastructures, as ransomware variants were conventionally built to attack enterprise internal IT infrastructure. But this also makes the cloud a rich hunting ground for malicious actors who know that there have yet to be any major battle-tested ways to respond to ransomware attacks. Security experts also state that cybercriminal groups, like Alert and Monster, have begun to adopt cross-platform malware frameworks to target users among both Windows and Linux operating systems.
The Enterprise Security Ecosystem Will Expand into The Home as Users Continue a Hybrid Work Environment
In 2023 work from home and office hybrid work will continue to be a new standard across many market segments. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, when a company’s security position was limited to on-premises networks, now with more organizations embracing flexible work models that will be the norm by 2024 the old security strategies are certainly outdated.
For all its benefits, new hybrid work can also run up costly security concerns: According to a joint study between IBM and the Ponemon Institute, data breaches can cost US$5.54 million on average for companies with at least 81% remote workers, as opposed to approximately US $3.15 million among companies where only half of employees work from home.
Even with security tactics like multi-factor authentication (MFA) that reinforce the security perimeter safeguarding against cyber attackers, the enterprise perimeter has grown too broad to safely consider all of the cloud components, bring-your-own device (BYOD) policies, and the numerous as-a-service applications that are now common to many businesses undergoing digital transformations.
Inconsistent Application of Cloud Technology & Tools Will Create Problems For Enterprises
Enterprises adopted cloud technology quickly within the past three years, migrating assets and operations to facilitate work-from-home solutions and technology. The biggest challenges for businesses, particularly established companies used to more traditional systems, were the speed of migration, adoption of newly created cloud technology, and the integration of these changes into the hybrid work environment. This fairly quick momentum is only set to continue in 2023; in fact, Forrester projects cloud adoption to continue at a record pace in the financial and regulated sectors. Because of these changes, the main security issues that businesses should be concerned with occur from the inconsistency of implementation and misconfiguration of cloud technology.
For example, in terms of data backup: there may be a “restore” option on one cloud vendor and a “restore” solution another cloud vendor, but both these options could look vastly different. It is vital for companies IT teams to evaluated and assessed these protocols. Most importantly, is the support team capable of executing both restore processes in parallel. These are the situations that will cause problems for enterprises in the coming year. Asset attributes and procedures and controls might also be different from vendor to vendor, and that can cause a lot of issues in a mixed environment.
There may also be some security issues coming from the developers’ side as well. Cloud developers are becoming increasingly agile and may put security on the backburner as they progress with their development. Security specialists also anticipate that cyber attackers will take advantage of application and service vulnerabilities for external and internal services, since enterprises may not be on top of patching vulnerabilities in a timely manner.
Social Engineering Is a Major Cyber Threat That Will Continue to Reach Across Markets and Users Bases as Attackers Adopt New Technology Like Deepfakes
Attackers can always count on human unreliability as the one constant amid market economies and technologies in transition. It is why social engineering-based attacks will never go out of style, they are versatile enough that we foresee the arrival of new reconfigured versions of tried-and-tested tactics in 2023. Social attacks are normally centered around current events and issues that have a broad public interest, but we will see an increase in more complex varied targeted consumer frauds. Online fraudsters will continue to be on the prowl for users who are more likely to fall for a new spin such as the classic honey trap, which involves malicious actors using fake user profiles to lure potential victims into a relationship and fool them out of their money.
Another area where we will see scammers reconfiguring old techniques with new toolboxes is in business email compromise (BEC), where cyber attackers impersonate senior executives over email to defraud a company. This cyber attach fraud will continue to afflict enterprises in 2023. The market for BEC is expected to increase at an annual compound rate of approaching 19.4%. Although the use of open-source email security software will have a hand in impeding that growth, BEC unfortunately remains a lucrative criminal venture. It is estimated that losses resulting from BEC attacks will amount to around $2.8 billion by 2027. These can be so financially devastating to enterprises that in a recent advisory, the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) warns that BEC is a major threat to the global economy.
Enterprises Need to Stay Vigilant and Integrate New Cybersecurity Approaches and Technologies Against the Increasing Cyber Threats
In response to these projected Cyber threats this coming year, demand for a unified cybersecurity platform will continue to gain traction among organizations whose needs now call for expanded visibility over their increasing assets that are spread across various environments, networks, and operating systems. Companies will need to be in a position to detect malicious cyber threat activity on their systems on a larger scale if they are to protect their organization against attacks from malicious actors that are continuing to be even more methodical and sophisticated in their cyber-attack strategies.
Companies in all market segments need to integrate a platform-based approach that integrates a cybersecurity vendor’s own offerings with third-party tools, which not only streamlines the user experience but provides robust cyber security defenses with enterprise-wide visibility across their growing IT infrastructure. The challenge for organizations in the coming year is not just to consolidate their technology tool sets to stay vigilant against these cyber threat groups, but also play catch-up with those that cyber criminal organizations worldwide moving forward.
Though we predict that more businesses will come around to the benefits of investing in security tools and platforms, their widespread adoption still requires buy-in from the upper management. Chief finance officers will have more of a hand in steering an organization’s purchasing priorities on cybersecurity, alongside CISOs, in 2023. However, this may leave short sighted companies insufficiently protected if their focus is on costs alone rather than cybersecurity threat capabilities: A recent survey among CFOs worldwide shows that 87% of respondents were confident in their company’s ability to avert cyberattacks, despite 61% of them experiencing at least three security incidents in the last 18 months.
The input and involvement of CFOs and other executive management is crucial to an organization’s overall security position since they will also have to contend with rising cyber insurance premiums and the scrutinizing review of insurers and industry regulators who examine existing security measures. Considering this, organizations will have to address this disconnect and awareness gap among their C-suite ranks about the real cybersecurity risk factors that these cyberthreats pose to their day-to-day operations!
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