Prediction 1: AI Makes the CISO’s Landscape More Challenging
Business and IT departments will struggle to define true ownership of AI. Meanwhile, cybersecurity best practices around AI will be left behind, and attackers will leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI to significantly improve spear phishing emails, combining them with deepfake and other AI-enabled attacks to increase click rates.
Call to Action
- CISOs need to focus on facilitating and communicating risk for AI-enabled projects to the business. They should prioritise projects that support the highest-value capabilities and where cybersecurity has the most business impact.
- CISOs will need to leverage AI-enabled platforms to decrease complexity and increase security efficacy while learning from their peers about AI-security best practices.
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Prediction 2: Generative AI Accelerates Cybersecurity as an Enabler
As Generative AI models mature through 2024, the rise of Security Copilots will increase Security Operations (SecOps) productivity. This significantly changes the focus within the team towards a proactive vs. reactive mindset, with a greater focus on building threat intelligence platforms that leverage AI as early-warning systems. In addition, a greater focus on threat-hunting programs will provide better visibility to attack surfaces before security teams embark on digital-first projects.
Call to Action
- The CISO role will evolve towards a Chief AI Security Officer (CAISO), using AI models to help predict threats proactively via real-time and autonomous systems.
- This evolution of the CISO role will have a unique opportunity to bring business leaders together and use cybersecurity as the key foundation to confidently build AI-enabled digital projects.
- Defining metrics that can be tracked, such as incident resolution and AI protection against data poisoning or degradation, will increase significantly.
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Prediction 3: Consolidation with Platformisation Will Significantly Improve Security Outcomes
As a top business priority for 2024, cybersecurity consolidation promises decreased cost and complexity but not increased cyber efficacy. Businesses will learn that consolidation does not equal platformisation, and projects focused on cost efficiency without a focus on optimisation and better security outcomes will fall short.
Call to Action
- Security teams need to deliver modular systematic platformisation as a differentiator for the business, significantly reducing vendors from over 30+ down to 2-3 trusted cybersecurity partners working within an ecosystem.
- Businesses should leverage an innovative cyber partner that can help consolidate but also focus on real-time and autonomous security outcomes while improving simplicity and integration.
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Prediction 4: Regulators’ Resources Under Pressure
NIS2 and DORA bring increased requirements across more organisations compared to NIS.
The requirements bring a risk of misinterpretation and incomplete information delivered, which leads to a lack of resources for authorities to prioritise and qualify cases. The result will be fewer resources for support, education, and reaction.
Call to Action
- Both authorities and organisations will need to leverage technology to proactively understand the severity and potential impact of new requirements rather than assess reactively during a time of crisis.
- It’s essential authorities and organisations build programs founded on technologies for attack surface management, proactive threat briefings and assessments, as well as leverage incident response retainers with a reputable security organisation.
- Authorities will need to have a threat-informed approach to cybersecurity to qualify reports.
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Prediction 5: Boards Get on Board with Cybersecurity
New regulations such as NIS2 require greater accountability by board members towards cybersecurity. As a result, organisations will add more experts or former CISOs to their boards and create dedicated cybersecurity committees to combat the growing scrutiny by regulators. Willingness to up-skill cybersecurity knowledge will be a key driver for fostering CISO/Board trust.
Call to Action
- Build a governance framework for cyber resilience sponsored by the board.
- Schedule regular annual board briefings and include your ecosystem partners (e.g. strategic vendors, customers and/or suppliers), and run board advisory services and tabletop exercises.
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Prediction 6: Organisations Begin to Assess Their Infrastructure for Quantum Readiness
At least 50% of organisations across critical infrastructures, such as financial services or national security, will launch projects to assess the impact of emerging quantum computing on their cybersecurity posture.
Call to Action
- Assess the risk to your organisation of threat actors who can eavesdrop, capture encrypted communication and store it away to decrypt later when quantum computers become widely available.
- Map self-developed applications and vendor technologies where Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) will become necessary immediately or in 2025.
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Prediction 7: Organisations Align Security Closely to the Software Development Pipeline, So Security Is Built at the Same Speed that Applications Are Engineered
The proliferation of Generative AI applied to software engineering will lead to a spike of buggy self-developed software as well as accelerated attacks against those applications. Paired with the increasing risk of supply chain attacks and an explosion of open source usage, at least 30% of enterprises will prioritise application security as their top 3 cyber risk in 2024.
Call to Action
- Assess your security posture in, of, and around the software engineering pipeline and build a plan to run security at the speed of engineering.
- Strategise security measures according to Developer Experience (DevEx), such as frictionless integration into the developer ecosystem, context between code-build-run, controls-as-code and high automation, using infrastructure-as-code security tools.