DailyPost 2858
CYBER THREAT LANDSCAPE
The health of our digital systems today is directly proportional to our health in every human field. In the fast changing cyber world, to have the threat landscape change at a dynamic level is most expected. Given this ever moving goalpost, first it needs to be discovered. Until and unless we don’t know the ailment fully and completely, the question of treatment does not arise. Annual threat reports do give us an idea as to the direction in which cyber security is moving and what should remain our area of focus. In today’s scenario a few things have to be kept in mind as the common denominators.
First and foremost is the ever growing strength of adversaries, the unabated ransomware attacks with well established gangs and very neat specialisation in work pertaining to the ransomware breach life cycle indicate the same. Cloud remains under threat more than ever, given the nature of mass scale adoption during Covid and beyond. Finally the most important and the game changer would be the use of generative AI, whether by the cyber security companies, the adversaries or the government in its intervention in a variety of ways. Suffice, generative AI can take the government intervention to a totally different level.
In the 2023 landscape we find the theme of stealth previals. It has been in vogue since the days of Stuxnet, which can be treated as the 9/11 of the cyber world. As the 2023 landscape gets into 2024 the chances of adversaries to leverage techniques to maximise stealth, speed and impact is huge. The most conspicuous aspect of the emerging 2024 landscape is that the speed and the ferocity continue to accelerate as they compress the time between initial entry, lateral movement and breach. As predicted, “cloud environment intrusions increased by 75% from 2022 to 2023, with cloud-conscious cases increasing by 110% and cloud agnostic cases increasing by 60%.
The next game changer already making waves is the generative AI. As has been often repeated the generative AI has the potential to lower the barrier of entry for low-skilled adversaries. It would make it easier to launch attacks that are more sophisticated and state of art. Cyber threats have become more alarming today due to the widespread use of hands-on or “interactive intrusion” techniques. These intrusions “leverage the creativity and problem solving skills of human adversaries. With these users mimicking expected user and administrator behaviour, it makes it difficult for the defenders to differentiate between legitimate user activity and cyber attack.
THE BEST USE CASE WAY OF GENERATIVE AI WOULD BE THE GAMECHANGER.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.