The future of cybercrime: Are you prepared for AI-powered attacks?

A data breach isn’t just an IT problem, it impacts your entire business. The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was a whopping $4.45 million (“Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023: Insights, Mitigators and Best Practices”) and it took on average 204 days to even identify the breach (Morgan Lewis et al.). Beyond the overall financial toll, a security breach damages your reputation, breaks down the trust with your end consumers, and ultimately disrupts your current and future operations. 

AI is radically revolutionizing industries, but also creating a unique cybersecurity challenge. Hackers no longer need to fully understand all the attack vectors and vulnerabilities of a system. They can now leverage AI and AI agents to automate a plethora of attacks; social engineering leveraging deepfakes, phishing or spam campaigns, bot attacks to drive DDoS, system vulnerability exploits, malware creation, and many more can now be created and deployed with ease against your enterprise. Imagine an AI-powered program which analyzes employee emails to identify weaknesses in your security protocols and would then craft targeted social engineering attacks which mimic your employee’s communication styles. 

How can you start taking back control? To begin, we’ve created a simple checklist to assess your current cybersecurity posture: 

1. Do you have a documented cybersecurity policy that all employees understand?

A cybersecurity policy includes standardized practices and procedures that will help you stay one step ahead of possible threats and respond to incidents. 

2. Have you conducted a recent vulnerability assessment to identify weakness in your systems? 

Vulnerability assessments should be carried out regularly with extra scans after security incidents or major system changes. They will identify issues in your IT ecosystem and help focus on the risks that could create the most harm.

3. Do your employees receive regular cybersecurity awareness training? 

Training your employees will serve to best manage the risk of human error and breaches by helping them understand the security measures and procedures and how to recognize and respond to threats.

4. Do you plan for responding to a cyber attack?

An adequate and coordinated response to a cyber incident can save companies money, customers and reputation loss as well as time recovering from the incident.

5. Are you leveraging AI-powered security tools to stay one step ahead of attackers? 

Artificial intelligence’s ability to process colossal amounts of data enhance the ability to identify and mitigate cyber threats. 

Often, technical jargon is the barrier to clear communication leaving leadership with a false feeling of comfort. Here are a few questions you can ask your security team or Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP): 

1. What are the top three cybersecurity threats facing our company right now?
2. What are we doing to mitigate these threats?
3. Are we adequately prepared for an AI-powered attack?
4. How can we improve our security awareness training?