By Derek Manky | November 09, 2023
With the growth of Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS) operations and the advent of generative AI, threat actors have more “easy” buttons at their fingertips to assist with carrying out attacks than ever before. By relying on the growing capabilities in their respective toolboxes, adversaries will increase the sophistication of their activities. They’ll launch more targeted and stealthier hacks designed to evade robust security controls, as well as become more agile by making each tactic in the attack cycle more efficient.
In our 2024 threat predictions report, our FortiGuard Labs team looks at a new era of advanced cybercrime, examines how AI is changing the (attack) game, shares fresh threat trends to watch for this year and beyond, and offers advice on how organizations everywhere can enhance their collective resilience against an evolving threat landscape.
The Evolution of Old Favorites
We've been observing and discussing many fan-favorite attack tactics for years and covered these topics in past reports. The "classics" aren't going away—instead, they're evolving and advancing as attackers gain access to new resources. For example, when it comes to advanced persistent cybercrime, we anticipate more activity among a growing number of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. In addition to the evolution of APT operations, we predict that cybercrime groups, in general, will diversify their targets and playbooks, focusing on more sophisticated and disruptive attacks, and setting their sights on denial of service and extortion.
Cybercrime "turf wars" continue, with multiple attack groups homing in on the same targets and deploying ransomware variants, often within 24 hours or less. In fact, we’ve observed such a rise in this type of activity that the FBI issued a warning to organizations about it earlier this year.
And let’s not forget about the evolution of generative AI. This weaponization of AI is adding fuel to an already raging fire, giving attackers an easy means of enhancing many stages of their attacks. As we’ve predicted in the past, we’re seeing cybercriminals increasingly use AI to support malicious activities in new ways, ranging from thwarting the detection of social engineering to mimicking human behavior.
