What cybersecurity trends are expected in 2023?

• KnowBe4 predicts that social media scams will become a new battleground against social engineering.
• KnowBe4 also sees that the creation of a security culture will increase across all enterprises globally.

It might seem like knowing about potential future disruptions to businesses would improve readiness for emerging threats, but this is not the case. Predictions can only be made based on statistics and trends in how cybercriminals act and react to situations. The only constant is the reoccurrence of ransomware over the past few years. 

Since cybercriminals continue to evolve their attacks, ransomware has been a significant problem for cybersecurity for years and doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Several business networks remain vulnerable, due to security flaws for which there have been updates for a while.

In response to the ever-evolving threat landscape, the world’s leading security awareness training and simulated phishing platform provider, KnowBe4, just revealed its 2023 cybersecurity predictions from its industry experts. The following are the top 5 predicted cybersecurity trends for 2023:

A shift in focus toward developing a security culture across organizations worldwide

Most organizations now recognize the importance of security awareness training, and many are shifting their focus from training alone to including behavior and culture. Building a strong security culture with the backing of executives and the entire employee base has gained positive momentum globally.

A surge in social media scams is said to represent a new social engineering battleground

Scams on social media will proliferate, endangering friends, family, organizations, and co-workers. As the social media commerce and marketplace industries continue to expand, people will be relying more on indicators of trust, such as how many connections an account has and how long the account has been active, making them more vulnerable to scams that use stolen social media accounts to deceive people and businesses. Scammers will undoubtedly profit from the fact that official verification is now available for little cost on various platforms.

An increase in devastating attacks on critical infrastructure

Given the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia, it is also probable that a significant outage may happen because of compromised critical infrastructure. For a huge number of people, even a whole nation, this might have social and economic repercussions. Digital civil disobedience may also take the shape of people targeting their government websites or national infrastructure as a method of protest in response to the global recession and rising cost of living.

The effectiveness of dangerous deepfake attacks will increase, damaging reputations

Deepfakes are a dangerous method used to gain someone’s trust by getting them to take someone’s words and actions at face value. Organizations still need to adequately educate their employees on this subject because they are unaware of the risks it poses to their reputation.

The Metaverse expands the attack surface and introduces new threats

It is getting harder to fully secure organizations worldwide since there are more threat vectors, leading to a bigger attack surface. Cybercriminals now have additional options to launch attacks thanks to the growth of the Metaverse.

According to Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4, this list of predicted cybersecurity trends was compiled by their global team of experts, who collectively have decades of expertise in the industry.

“They are at the forefront of what is happening in the industry, constantly following trends, and staying up to date on the latest threats, tools and techniques. Many of them noted a fundamental shift in focus for organizations beyond security awareness training alone to striving for a strong security culture that is driven by measurable behavioral change. Also, social engineering will continue to dominate as an overwhelmingly successful method for cybercriminals to execute attacks,” explained Sjouwerman. 

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