Keeper Security has released its 2024 Keeper Security Insight Report, ‘The Future of Defense: IT Leaders Brace for Unprecedented Cyber Threats’. The report, based on a survey of more than 800 IT and security leaders around the globe, reveals the role that emerging technology plays in the evolving threat landscape and how IT leaders are struggling to keep up.
Survey respondents cite AI-powered attacks as the most serious emerging attack vector and the most challenging to handle. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated, breaking historically secure solutions and inflicting damage on vulnerable organizations across every sector.
Emerging technology fuels increasingly sophisticated attacks
92 percent of respondents reveal they’ve seen an increase in cyber attacks year-over-year. As cyber security incidents become more frequent, 95% of IT leaders say that cyber attacks are also more sophisticated than ever – and they are unprepared for this new wave of threat vectors.
According to IT leaders the emerging attack vectors they’re witnessing first-hand at their organizations are:
- AI-powered attacks: 51%
- Deepfake technology and supply chain attacks: both 36%
- Cloud jacking: 35%
- Internet of Things (IoT) attacks and 5G network exploits: both 34%
- Fileless attacks: 24%
IT leaders report they are ill-equipped to defeat those emerging techniques, lacking defence for:
- AI-powered attacks: 35%
- Deepfake technology: 30%
- 5G network exploits: 29%
- Cloud jacking: 25%
- Fileless attacks: 23%
Even as they prepare to overcome emerging attack techniques, IT security leaders must face the problems of today: in fact, 73% of respondents report experiencing a cyber attack that resulted in monetary loss. Direct financial impact is one of many consequences of a successful cyber attack, along with business disruption, enduring revenue loss, customer and partner attrition and tarnished reputation.
Contending with today’s attacks
While novel threats cast a looming shadow, IT leaders are stretched thin as they combat today’s most common threat vectors, with the following types of attacks directly impacting their organizations:
- Phishing: 61%
- Malware: 59%
- Ransomware: 49%
- Password attacks: 38%
The explosion in AI tools has intensified problems like phishing attacks by increasing the believability of scams and enabling cybercriminals to deploy them at scale. 84 percent of respondents said that phishing and smishing have become more difficult to detect with the rise in popularity of AI-powered tools, and revealed that AI-powered phishing is their top concern (42%) when it comes to AI security. In addition to phishing, malicious actors weaponise AI to speed up and scale other common attack techniques, such as password cracking.
Among the multitude of cyber attacks increasing in frequency, survey respondents cite:
- Phishing: 51%
- Malware: 49%
- Ransomware: 44%
- Password attacks: 31%
