What cybersecurity trends are emerging in 2024?
Security operations firm Artic Wolf, has published findings from its annual State of Cybersecurity: 2024 Trends Report, based on a global survey the company commissioned from Sapio Research of over 1,000 senior IT and cybersecurity decision makers from organisations in over fifteen different countries.
The State of Cybersecurity: 2024 Trends Report provides security executives and practitioners with insights into the current and future state of the cybersecurity landscape so they can help their organisations deliver positive security outcomes in an ever-evolving threat environment and remain on the forefront of cyber defence.
The report found that business email compromise (BEC) is now the top method of attack with almost three quarters (70%) of organisations becoming the targets of attempted BEC attacks in the last year, with almost a third (29%) of these targets becoming victims of one or more successful BEC occurrences.
Nearly half (45%) of respondents claim their organisation suffered a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, an increase from last year, with the majority (86%) of those attacks including successful data exfiltration.
Two thirds (66%) of organisations that suffered a data breach in the last year chose to publicly disclose information regarding their incidents, while a third (30%) only disclosed their breaches to impacted parties.
Furthermore, the report found that cyber insurance demand and adoption is widespread, with an exceedingly small fraction (5%) of organisations deciding not to acquire coverage. Of the remaining organisations surveyed, the majority (66%) have an active cyber insurance policy, while a near additional third (29%) are in the process of obtaining or planning to obtain a policy this year.
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A majority of organisations (94%) either currently have or plan to implement adoption and usage policies around generative AI and large language models (LLM) tools this year.
“This year’s insights highlight the increasing sophistication of threat actors and the realities of cyber incidents for organisations all around the world. Attackers are focusing on the human element, as evident with the overwhelming targeting via business email compromise. No matter the method of intrusion, the stakes are even higher for business leaders as most successful ransomware attacks involve data exfiltration,” said Ian McShane, vice president, Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Arctic Wolf.
