KnowBe4 has released its 2023 cybersecurity predictions from its team of industry experts.
The top five predicted cybersecurity trends for 2023 include:
* A shift in focus to creating a security culture within organizations across the globe – The need for security awareness training is now clear to most organizations and they are starting to evolve from just training to additional emphasis on behaviour and culture. There has been a positive momentum toward building a strong security culture globally that involves support from executives and the employee base as a whole.
* A new social engineering battleground purported by an increase in social media scams – Social media scams will blossom, putting friends, family, organisations and colleagues at risk. With the ever-growing industry of social media commerce and marketplaces, people will be relying even more on indicators of trust, such as how many connections an account has and how long the account has been active, making them susceptible to scams that use stolen social media accounts to trick individuals and organisations. Also, with official verification now for sale for a small fee on various platforms, scammers are sure to take advantage.
* A rise in catastrophic attacks on critical infrastructure – It is also likely that a major outage will occur due to critical infrastructure being compromised, especially given the ongoing war in the Ukraine with Russia. This could have the potential to have societal and economic impacts for a large number of people or even an entire nation. With a global recession and rising cost of living, we may also see digital civil disobedience occurring in the form of people attacking their own government sites or national infrastructure as a form of protest.
* Dangerous deepfake attacks will become more convincing and damage reputations – Deepfakes are a dangerous tool used to build a level of trust, convincing unsuspecting people to accept the words and actions of someone at face value. Organisations do not have a deep level of understanding about the dangers this can present regarding reputation and thus do not yet train their employees enough on the topic.
* Larger attack surface introduces new threats with the Metaverse – There is an increasing number of threat vectors that are subsequently creating a larger attack surface, making it more difficult to adequately protect organisations worldwide. With the proliferation of the Metaverse, there are more opportunities for cybercriminals to perpetrate attacks.