Predicting the Cyber Future — Security Today

Predicting the Cyber Future

• By Marcus Fowler
• Nov 21, 2022

A look ahead to 2023 we can expect to see changes in MFA, continued Hactivism from non-state actors, CISOs lean in on more proactive security and crypto-jackers will get more perceptive.

Attacker tradecraft centers on identity and MFA. It was not just the recent Uber attack where the victim’s Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) was compromised. At the core of the vast majority of cyber incidents is the theft and abuse of legitimate credentials. In the case of Uber, we saw that MFA can be defeated, and with Okta, that the MFA companies themselves become targets – potentially as a mechanism to reduce its effectiveness in other customer environments.

Once considered a ‘silver bullet’ in the fight against credential stuffing, it has not taken attackers long to find and exploit weaknesses in MFA and they will continue to do so in 2023. MFA will remain critical to basic cyber hygiene, but it will cease to be seen as a stand-alone ‘set and forget’ solution. Questions around accessibility and usability continue to dominate the MFA discussion. This will be amplified by increases in cloud and SaaS along with the dissolution of traditional on-prem networks. 

Today and in the future, MFA should be viewed as one component of a wider zero trust architecture, one where behavior-based analytics are central to understanding employee behavior and authenticating the actions taken using certain credentials.

Continued ‘hacktivism’ from non-state actors complicates cyber attribution and security strategies. The so-called ‘vigilante’ approach to cyber geopolitics is on the rise. Recent attacks launched by groups such as Killnet, though limited in their operational impact, have not failed in their aim to dominate global headlines in light of the Russo-Ukraine conflict, mounting concerns that these citizen-led operations could become more destructive or that states could use these groups as a deniable proxy.