2024 is poised to be a hotbed for new challenges in cybersecurity. As both economic and political terrains continue to undergo digitization, enterprises will increasingly leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), the cloud, and Web3 technologies. While these innovations are expected to lend a hand to organizations, they also provide opportunities for cybercriminals by promising big returns, more streamlined operations on wider impact zones, and more targeted victims. In this report, we detail the focal points of next year’s threat landscape, along with insights and recommended mitigation measures from our team of cybersecurity experts that are designed to guide decision-makers toward well-informed choices.

The goal of this paper is to help decision-makers and entities who can protect systems from ransomware at scale, such as the security industry, governments, and policymakers, to form defensive strategies on how best to make an impact on the ransomware ecosystem. While this paper does not focus on hands-on technical defenses that an enterprise would look to for deployment, it does aim to provide decision-makers with methods for understanding the level of risk that an organization faces from this threat.

Our annual cybersecurity report sheds light on the major security concerns that surfaced and prevailed in 2022. We also discuss how cybercriminals, specifically ransomware actors, are taking their cue from legitimate organizations when it comes to diversifying their portfolios and rebranding their image, and the top vulnerabilities that malicious actors have abused last year.