Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024.  Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Netskope Experts: What’s in Store for 2024?

By: Members of the Netskope executive team

As we approach 2024, we once again polled some of our esteemed experts here at Netskope to see what they have on their radar for the coming year. Here’s what our experts predict will unfold in the new year, with artificial intelligence (AI), the threat landscape, geopolitics, corporate governance and cyber skills top of mind:

AI

Generative AI for continuous analysis and monitoring

“In the coming year, I think we will see generative AI be used to analyze a company’s existing policies, regulatory requirements, and threat landscape to generate tailored security policies. I also think we will also see generative AI used to continuously monitor a company’s network and systems for policy violations and automatically respond to issues.” – Mike Anderson, CIO & CDO

AI assistants are here to stay

“2024 will be the year of the AI assistant. As demand for AI increases and organizations experiment with new services, it will become common for employees to leverage their own AI assistant either in simplifying existing tasks or supporting and enhancing new methods of working. As a result, both security and privacy will need to be considered by organizations.” – Neil Thacker, CISO EMEA

Generative AI used to plan cyberattacks

“We will see the release of generative AI that uses the ‘tree of thought’ prompting to help plan cyber attacks. It’s quite possible that we could see something arise that plugs into other pieces of the botnet ecosystem that will make launching attacks a simple question of paying for what you want and then typing it in. It may even escalate the frequency and intensity of cyber attacks from parties who are engaged in physical conflicts around the world.” – Colin Estep, Principal Engineer

Generative AI chatbots will be increasingly abused to deliver malware and phishing

“Delivering trojan-ized installers, phishing and scam websites through search engine result pages has been an effective technique deployed by attackers throughout 2023. As generative AI chatbots continue to rise in popularity, we should expect that they will also be abused to serve malicious payloads next year. Organizations should ensure visibility and control to protect their users from this attack vector.” – Jan Michael L. Alcantara, Threat Research Engineer

Threat Landscape, Beyond AI

Social engineering will dominate the threat landscape

“Social engineering will be the primary infiltration tactic in cyberattacks, because it can be effective against a wide variety of targets. The primary channels for social engineering will include messaging apps, social media, phone calls, text messages, and of course email.” – Ray Canzanese, Head of Netskope Threat Labs

Corporate Governance

Realizing continuous adaptive trust

“As we close 2023, it’s fair to say that organizations the world over have enthusiastically embraced the broad concepts of zero trust as they seek an appropriate model for pivotal cybersecurity transformation.  However, in 2024 I expect to see organizations pushing harder for vendors to put meat on the bones of the concept. In particular I think we will see them interrogate promises of what zero means in this context, seeking out ever increasing granularity and looking for ways to implement ‘continuously adaptive’ zero trust, where each request is processed as it emerges, irrespective of its genuine origin and destination.” – James Christiansen, ​​VP, CSO – Cloud Security Transformation

Geopolitics

Potential for Cyber Peace Agreements on the horizon

“Wars have historically played out on land, sea, and air, but the digital domain is fast emerging as the latest battleground. As we approach 2024 – and beyond – major geopolitical confrontations will increasingly involve cyber elements, elevating cybersecurity to a top priority for countries globally. Just as peace treaties are negotiated for conventional wars, 2024 may see proposals for ‘Cyber Peace Agreements’ between nations.” – James Christiansen, ​​VP, CSO – Cloud Security Transformation

AI regulations facing scrutiny

“Proposed AI regulations will come under scrutiny in 2024. We are already seeing countries and entire regions proposing new AI regulations to counter and attempt to control new services, but will we see draft regulations proposed and updated that can support innovation alongside ethics and privacy? All eyes are on the U.S, Europe, and China but could other countries steal a march by delaying their own regulations to enter the AI arms race?” – Neil Thacker, CISO EMEA

Skills

The CISO role will continue to transform

“In the coming year, I expect to see an increasing number of CISO roles moving from ‘technical/tactical’ towards being board whisperers, cross-functional influencers, and drivers of cultural transformation. The people with these new powers are the right leaders to drive the Digital Trust agenda which is becoming essential to organizational strategies.” – Ilona Simpson, CIO EMEA

While this is just a look into what could be in store for 2024, head to the Netskope blog for other notable predictions and expert insights: https://www.netskope.com/blog.