2023 will be remembered as the year when battle lines were drawn, then redrawn, along a threat landscape stuck in a state of in-between: No longer are enterprises scrambling to find their footing amid the disruption caused by Covid-19, but for all this talk of the “new normal,” the world has yet to arrive on the other side of the pandemic. The resulting mass-transition of company assets to digital environments has led to increasingly complicated and layered digital environments that will provide the ideal playground for adversaries looking to prey on any lack of visibility.
As enterprises expand their business — and with it, their attack surface — it’s imperative that they don’t lose sight of the human element on both sides of a cyberattack: Many workforces have now adjusted to hybrid work setups, but blurring the lines between on-site and at-home work will require security teams to do away with conventional point solution-based strategies if they are to stay on top of any potential entry points for opportunistic attackers. It will be important for the C-suite to maintain a big-picture view of their digital infrastructure with a more holistic approach to security, but emerging threats in 2023 will be ones that resonate with a variety of stakeholders that include security teams, legislators, and end consumers. Companies — or at least, their financial officers — will find themselves caught in the push-and-pull of governments calling for more regulations in data security, and a global economy on the cusp of a recession that is sure to make funding threat prevention and response a challenge.
The coming year will also be a time when enterprises and end-users will step back and reevaluate that which not too long ago seemed like they would become transformative innovations: By 2023, the shine will have worn off the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but the blockchain that powers them will be a safe haven for attackers who want to operate without scrutiny. Public trust in open-source software remains up in the air, as we predict more attackers rushing to cash in on the spate of opensource flaws that are bound to surface, leaving developers in the lurch. Similarly, vulnerabilities that
rocked the cybersecurity industry, like Log4Shell, may be in the recent past, but still cast a long shadow over lawmakers and businesses worrying about future open-source woes.
Malicious actors will weather this period of uncertainty by hunkering down and striking at old, but reliable, pain points instead of taking big risks that promise bigger payouts. They will revisit the outdated protocols and devices that enterprises should have rightly seen as dead weight long ago and treat them as fresh attack vectors. Businesses should also be on the lookout for familiar threats in new trappings, as attackers fall back on tried-and-true tactics. The rising complexity of social engineering scams, with their proven track record of exploiting people — the weakest link in any security chain — will continue into 2023, as fraudsters incorporate novel technologies like deepfakes in their schemes to stack the odds in their favor. Likewise, expect more threat actors to adapt old-school techniques into “living off the cloud” attacks5 that will enable them to commandeer legitimate tools and services as part of their kill chains.
Other cybercriminals will be spending 2023 continuously fine-tuning their methods in a more professional operation. Better-armed security teams and legislators clamping down on crime will finally push beleaguered ransomware actors into regrouping and refining their playbooks — we may even come to see some reinventing themselves entirely into data extortion groups instead.
Their adversaries may be content to wait out 2023 until the next wave of seismic changes, but enterprises can regard the incoming year as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for forward-looking countermeasures that can reduce the blast radius of cyberattacks. Our report provides security insights from our threat experts, with the aim of helping decision-makers make informed decisions and develop a strategic security response that can protect organizations across multiple fronts.
