Five Trends for Cybersecurity in 2024
By Marc Farron
What should small & midsize companies (SMBs) anticipate from cybercrimes and cybersecurity this year?
Here are five trends that will dominate the cybersecurity landscape for 2024.
Generative AI
Unless you’ve slept through the last year you’ve been inundated with the ‘AI buzz’. Artificial Intelligence, and particularly Generative AI, has taken off and gone mainstream. Companies are trying to figure out how to incorporate Generative AI into their organization and leverage it to gain a competitive advantage.
Internal Risks: First, there are internal risks to using Generative AI that SMBs should be aware of. They include:
Confidentiality: Employees erroneously enter confidential information/intellectual property into AI engines, rendering the date ‘public information’.
Integrity: Generative AI makes mistakes and makes things up. Companies must carefully review all AI generated content
Accessibility: AI engines are very expensive to run (ChatGPT costs $700 million per day to operate). Users can have issues accessing these engines.
External Threats: The bad guys will use AI tools to generate more sophisticated attacks.
This will include:
- Writing malware
- Automated malware and deep fake attacks
- Generating better phishing emails.
The good news is that cybersecurity vendors are leveraging AI to produce a new group of solutions to combat the growing sophistication of cyber-attacks.
increased and become more sophisticated Phishing Attacks (in part, due to Generative AI)
- Direct financial loss from successful phishing attacks increased by 76% in 2022.
- There was a 2% surge in phishing attacks last year, which is expected to continue.
The answer: SMBs must invest in cybersecurity training, awareness, and education. This includes conducting simulated (fake) phishing attacks to find out which employees are most vulnerable so additional training can be assigned.
Growing Regulations and Opportunities
Although larger enterprises are burdened more with compliances and regulations, SMBs will also see a growing number of regs and compliances.
This includes SMBs in the healthcare space (HIPPAA); around data protection (General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) or those wanting to do business with particular verticals like the Department of Defense (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC)).
Increased Awareness of Cybersecurity
Some good news. Cybersecurity is being taken more seriously in Small & Midsize businesses. Owners and managers can’t help but hear of cyber-attacks on major corporations in the news every day as well as geopolitical cyber incidents. Owners and managers are having more discussions around cybersecurity.
Leveraging more sophisticated cybersecurity controls and tools.
Yes, the bad guys are getting better…but so are the solutions. Vendors are flooding the market with state-of-the-art, AI-embedded tools that will combat the latest trends. The challenge for SMBs is keeping up with these advances and making the right acquisitions.
Remember, the Small Business Development Center of FGCU is here to help.
Note: Special thanks to Ryan Spelman, Cyber Risk Managing Director at K Logix for assistance on this blog.
