The year 2023 to witness More Global Attacks

Hacktivism, deepfakes, attacks on business collaboration tools, new regulatory mandates, and pressure to cut complexity will top organizations’ security agendas over the coming years.

Cyberattacks across all industry sectors increased by 28% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to 2021, and Check Point predicts a continued sharp rise worldwide, driven by increases in ransomware exploits and in state-mobilized hacktivism driven by international conflicts.

At the same time, organizations’ security teams will face growing pressure as the global cyber workforce gap of 3.4 million employees widens further, and Governments are expected to introduce new cyber-regulations to protect citizens against breaches.

Deepfakes will go mainstream with hacktivists and cybercriminals leveraging video and voicemails for successful phishing and ransomware attacks. We are entering a new era of hacktivism, with increasing attacks motivated by political and social causes. Threat actors are becoming increasingly shameless and will turn their attention to critical infrastructure.

Experts say with the commercial availability of 5G we expect to see the number, scale and sophistication of these cyberattacks within the telco space increase overtime where the weekly impacted organisations by malware types was 4.8% via mobile (versus global average of 1.7%).

While there is an increased level of preparedness and awareness from a policy and strategy perspective in the country, the skills shortage within the cyber security industry could also pose a significant challenge to the country leaving gaps within the security posture of organisations.

While email and phishing go hand-in-hand and will still be dangerous and proliferate, in 2023 cyber criminals will also turn to business collaboration compromise, with phishing attacks used to access Slack, Teams, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. Employees are often loose with sharing data and personal information while using these business apps, making them a lucrative source of data for hackers.

In a multi-hybrid environment, many CISOs struggle to build a comprehensive security program with multiple vendors. In 2023, CISOs will decrease the number of security solutions deployed in favor of a comprehensive, single solution to reduce complexity.

The cyber criminals will increasingly turn to social media campaigns via Telegram, WhatsApp and other popular messaging apps. There will also be more cyber-attacks on Web3 blockchain platforms, mainly to overtake platforms and their users’ crypto assets.