2024 has seen a number of cybersecurity incidents, including high-profile cyberattacks and rapidly-developing artificial intelligence (AI).
Security leaders share some of the trends they have witnessed this year.
Louis Lang, CTO & Co-Founder at Phylum
"It's been about a year since the first nation state attack, executed by North Korea, in the open-source ecosystem. This method of software supply chain attacks are particularly effective at meeting their goals of bypassing sanctions. We expect to not only see more bad behavior from North Korea, but other nations start to initiate more attacks from the open-source ecosystem as well."
Benjamin Fabre, Co-founder and CEO at DataDome
"Basic bot attacks aren't going anywhere, even as bots become more sophisticated and scalable with the use of generative AI tools. DataDome's 2024 Global Bot Security Report found nearly two in three businesses were completely unprotected against basic bots. The most successful basic bots were the fake Chrome bots, with only 15.82% detected -- leaving businesses at risk for layer 7 DDoS attacks, account takeover fraud and other automated threats."
Renuka Nadkarni, CTO at Aryaka
"Legacy networking and security architectures optimized for point-to-point connectivity are not able to cope with the highly dynamic and distributed nature of users and applications. With hybrid work firmly established as the new norm, networks are only getting more and more highly distributed. Furthermore, organizations are aggressively leveraging AI to drive new business efficiencies. These trends are making networks far more complex, meaning they're much more difficult to manage and secure. Enterprises are finding that in this changing environment, traditional point solutions aren't sufficient for running and protecting their networks. They're also suffering from an increasing resource and skills gap in both areas that's exacerbating the issue."
From David Kellerman, Field CTO at Cymulate
"As with any emerging technology, regulation often lags behind rapid developments. We're already seeing many organizations implementing dedicated AI policies to evaluate and control the AI services they use. Current initiatives primarily focus on data privacy and the potential for AI to make critical errors. Initially, we can expect AI safety standards to evolve and become integrated into existing frameworks or form independent standards. Regulation may then extend to ethical considerations, defining acceptable versus unlawful uses of AI. Another significant question concerns legal responsibility: if an AI tool enables someone to commit a crime, does the tool's provider share liability? AI presents complex challenges for regulators, who must balance its potential benefits with its inherent risks."
Simone Sassoli, CEO at Virsec
"Last year, we saw events such as Change Healthcare and CrowdStrike that point to third-party risk, the common pitfall being trust in the software. We learned that the healthcare industry spent over $200B on cybersecurity in 2024, and we still have major headlines in newspapers worldwide, revealing that the consumer pays the price, not just the business."