In this year’s Annual Cyber Threat Monitor Report, we take a look back at the key events that shaped the cyber threat landscape in 2023, as well as looking ahead at the year to come, sharing insights from our Cyber Threat Intelligence team here at NCC Group. 2023 showed signs that the international community is beginning to take the threats from cyber adversaries more seriously. We saw several examples of coordinated law enforcement action against criminal groups, including key ransomware operators and individuals believed to be acting on behalf of foreign intelligence services.

Today’s cyber landscape is threatened by a multitude of malicious actors who have the tools to conduct large-scale fraud schemes, hold our money and data for ransom, and endanger our national security. Profit-driven cybercriminals and nation-state adversaries alike have the capability to paralyze entire school systems, police departments, healthcare facilities, and individual private sector entities. The FBI continues to combat this evolving cyber threat. Our strategy focuses on building strong partnerships with the private sector; removing threats from US networks; pulling back the cloak of anonymity many of these actors hide behind; and hitting cybercriminals where it hurts: their wallets, including their virtual wallets.

The 2023 Arctic Wolf State of Cybersecurity Trends Report took the temperature of organizations around the globe and sought to understand not only their current and future concerns, but how they were responding to the problems that had plagued them in previous years. Our research shows that, despite the enduring nature of many of these challenges, organizations are making measurable strides in areas where progress has proven limited in previous years.

The third annual Future of Application Security survey reveals how key stakeholders are responding to this challenge. We surveyed 1504 developers, CISOs, and AppSec managers from a broad range of industries across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions. The responsibility has shifted away from dedicated security teams and is now shared between AppSec managers and developers.

The events of this year have made clear that although blockchains are inherently transparent, the industry has room for improvement in this respect. There are opportunities to connect off-chain data on liabilities with on-chain data to provide better visibility, and transparency of DeFi, where all transactions are on-chain, is a standard that all crypto services should strive to achieve. As more and more value is transferred to the blockchain, all potential risks will become transparent, and we will have more complete visibility.

The goal of the index is simple: We combine on-chain data and real-world data to measure which countries are leading the world in grassroots crypto adoption. Grassroots crypto adoption isn’t about which countries have the highest raw transaction volumes — anyone could probably guess that the biggest, wealthiest countries are far ahead there. Instead, we want to highlight the countries where average, everyday people are embracing crypto the most. To do that, we’ve designed the Global Crypto Adoption Index to identify countries where the most people are putting the greatest share of their wealth into cryptocurrency.

This research aims to equip cloud security professionals, DevOps, DevSecOps, CISOs, and development leaders with valuable insights and practical recommendations for safeguarding their cloud environments, and in doing so, help to secure the cloud for everyone. In some ways, our study confirmed what is already widely known: attackers are constantly scanning the Internet for lucrative opportunities.

This report was compiled by analyzing data captured from billions of cloud assets on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud scanned by the Orca Cloud Security Platform. Leveraging unique insights into current and emerging cloud risks captured from the Orca Cloud Security Platform, this report reveals the most commonly found, yet dangerous, cloud security risks.

Dragos started the Year in Review to highlight significant trends in the OT cybersecurity community. This year’s report aims to go further by offering practitioners and leaders the most up-to-date data, along with perspectives from the field, to help them better defend critical infrastructure around the world. These perspectives are focused on providing actionable insights that have been tried and tested to help organizations effectively defend against and respond to industrial cyber threats.

The biggest shift the IBM X-Force team observed in 2023 was a pronounced surge in cyberthreats targeting identities. Attackers have a historical inclination to choose the path of least resistance in pursuit of their objectives. In this era, the focus has shifted towards logging in rather than hacking in, highlighting the relative ease of acquiring credentials compared to exploiting vulnerabilities or executing phishing campaigns. Lack of identity protections was corroborated by IBM X-Force penetration testing data for 2023, which ranked identification and authentication failures as the second most common finding.

With this report, we want to promote open sharing on cyber threats and incidents and give the industry a public and relevant cyber threat picture anchored on a solid, well-documented basis. The report and knowledge base are the product of a collaborative community effort with our members and the Nordic TIBER Cyber Teams (TCTs) at the centre, with contributions from Nordic government entities.

This report focuses primarily on hundreds of digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) engagements conducted by the Arctic Wolf Incident Response team. The vast majority of these engagements were initiated as part of cyber insurance policies, through our partnerships with insurance providers and privacy law practitioners.

This iteration of the Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report provides a forward-thinking view of cloud security with intelligence on emerging threats and actionable recommendations from Google’s security experts. This report explores top cloud threats and security concerns for 2024, including credential abuse, crypto-mining, ransomware, and data theft.

The 2024 edition of the CrowdStrike Global Threat Report arrives at a pivotal moment for our global community of protectors. The speed and ferocity of cyberattacks continue to accelerate as adversaries compress the time between initial entry, lateral movement and breach. At the same time, the rise of generative AI has the potential to lower the barrier of entry for low-skilled adversaries, making it easier to launch attacks that are more sophisticated and state of the art. These trends are driving a tectonic shift in the security landscape and the world.

This annual report features the work of 37 sophisticated cybersecurity teams working in partnership to advance 29 open-source projects that improve cyber defense for the whole community. This report captures the energy and passion that Center Participants bring to advancing threat- informed defense for all. Use it as a reference and share it with your teams and colleagues to further change the game on the adversary.

The Workplace Identity Security Trends and Challenges report investigates the identity security landscape and challenges facing organizations today. The research finds that many struggle to build an integrated and comprehensive identity security strategy, relying on disconnected tools and practices that create inefficiencies and leave organizations seriously vulnerable to attacks and breaches.

In this report, we bring you the insights from that data. It’s part of how we empower organizations to proactively navigate cyber risks, strengthen security approaches, and respond to incidents with unmatched efficiency. This report helps because it gathers real-world information from organizations like yours, so you can learn which threats really a#ect your peers–and how you can face them.

In this year’s report, 500 U.S.-based ITOps professionals express how automation increases their IT agility –reducing costs and enhancing endpoint management capabilities. The report also reveals that less than half (44%) of organizations have high ITOps agility, with the most agile showing mature uses of AI and workflow automation tools.

The 10th annual Imperva Bad Bot Report is a threat research report that analyzes and investigates the automated attacks occurring daily, sneaking past traditional detection methods and wreaking havoc on the internet. It is based on data collected from the company’s global network throughout 2022, which includes 6 trillion blocked bad bot requests, anonymized across thousands of domains. . In addition, this report offers meaningful information and guidance about the nature and impact of bots to help organizations better understand the potential risks of bot traffic when not properly managed.

Our goal is that this report serves as a crucial resource in enhancing your strategies and defenses in the battle to protect your organization’s assets and integrity against insider risks. This survey, capturing responses from 467 cybersecurity professionals across diverse sectors, seeks to uncover the nature of insider threat challenges faced by organizations, focusing on understanding the factors driving these threats, their detection and mitigation complexities, and the effectiveness of insider threat programs.

Connectivity is continuing to transform the Automotive and Smart Mobility ecosystem, increasing cybersecurity risks as more functionality is exposed. 2023 marked the beginning of a new era in automotive cybersecurity. Each attack carries greater significance today, and may have global financial and operational repercussions for various stakeholders. Upstream’s 2024 Global Annual Cybersecurity Report examines how cybersecurity risks have evolved from experimental hacks into large-scale risks, focusing on safety and trust, operational availability, data privacy, and financial implications.