3 big threats to watch out for in 2023
Phishing, large-scale cyberattacks that paralyze businesses, local communities, or hospitals, or even the risk of global cyberwar. The past year has been particularly complicated in terms of cybersecurity. 2023 should logically follow this trend. We have listed 3 threats that will have to be particularly observed in the coming months.
1) Ransomware
Perhaps the worst is over in terms of ransomware, this is in any case the point of view of Allan Liska, an analyst quoted by our colleagues from MIT Technology Review. The latter indicates that ransomware attacks have peaked this year. But experts on the subject differ, and some think they could increase further in 2023.
One thing is certain, organizations and individuals must be extra vigilant because ransomware is not going away anytime soon. Increasingly simple to use, these viruses indeed bring in colossal amounts to cybercriminals. It is therefore advisable to back up your data regularly, and to use, as far as possible, multi-factor authentication.
2) Deepfakes
Deepfakes are getting better, and that inspires cybercriminals. While telecommuting is the norm in many companies, it can become tempting to use this innovation to trick employees into sending money or information by impersonating an executive.
David Mahdi, analyst at Sectigo, warns: “We’re going to see this technology continue to improve and become more mainstream in 2023. Bad actors can easily make autoencoders – a kind of advanced neural network – to watch videos, study images, and listen to recordings of individuals in order to to imitate the physical attributes of an individual”.
It is also known that deepfakes could be used by some malicious actors in the context of romance scams, further improving the effectiveness of their scams.
3) Crypto-scams
McAfee predicts that cryptocurrency scams, already prevalent in 2022, are set to continue. For his part, the MIT Technology Review recalls that these attacks caused more than 100 large-scale victims in the sector in 2022. A new wave is to be expected in 2023, even if individuals are increasingly aware of the risks.
This year, we have also witnessed an explosion of cryptocurrency thefts and no less than 3 billion dollars have been stolen by hackers. You can find our more complete inventory of this phenomenon here.