Imperva, a prominent cybersecurity company, has shared its predictions for the key challenges facing the cyber security industry in 2024. As the influence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in cyber security operations grows, the threat landscape also changes, necessitating novel security strategies.
Expanding on this prediction, George Lee, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Imperva, expressed concern over Asia's readiness to tackle these issues, "Mature economies like Japan and Australia face different challenges than developing economies like Bangladesh and Thailand."
Imperva experts identified other significant trends for 2024. Reinhart Hansen, Director of Technology within the Imperva Office of the CTO, advised that the field of GenAI requires scrutiny and careful analysis.
The widespread "AI washing," where businesses falsely claim AI integration in their services, can mislead clients and the public. "Cyber criminals will leverage AI to build new attack vectors never seen before and generate new variants of existing vulnerabilities, leading to a surge of new Zero Day attacks," Hansen cautioned.
Lebin Cheng, Head of API Security at Imperva, highlighted another area of concern: the vast and growing network of application programming interfaces (APIs). Many businesses, Cheng noted, are unaware of the risks these APIs pose due to a lack of knowledge about their deployment and the data they are accessing.
"This exposes them to risks in magnitudes that they cannot comprehend or even begin to quantify," he added. Cheng predicts that 2024 will be the year organisations take substantial steps toward API security, investing in solutions that integrate with their existing security technology stack.
Continuing on the theme of data protection, Terry Ray, SVP of Data Security at Imperva, stated that an organisation's control over its data will become paramount in 2024. Businesses have a dangerous tendency to underestimate the security risks posed by lesser-valued and publicly available data.
"Every byte of data that an organisation holds is a security risk," Ray warned. He advised that companies need to better understand their data, its location and usage, and evaluate whether it needs to be stored at all.
In light of technological advancements, George Lee emphasised that traditional cyber threats, like phishing and social engineering attacks, continue to be the most prevalent and effective.
He called for a change in the general perception of cybersecurity, shifting from an issue for experts only to being a responsibility for everyone. "The first step is to make cybersecurity easier to understand and recognise that it isn't limited to advanced technology," Lee said.
Imperva works to help organisations protect critical applications, APIs, and data, anywhere, at scale, and with ROI. With an integrated approach combining edge, application security, and data security, Imperva protects companies through all stages of their digital journey.
Imperva Threat Research and the company's global intelligence community enable Imperva to stay ahead of the threat landscape and seamlessly integrate the latest security, privacy, and compliance expertise into our solutions.