Gartner Reveals Top Trends in GenAI Cybersecurity for 2024
Organizations, governments, academics, and countless others are looking for ways to harness the transformation power of GenAI technology. The majority of IT leaders (67%) are prioritizing GenAI for their business within the next 18 months. While there is great excitement about the promise of GenAI, there are also some concerns, including uncertainty about the impact of GenAI on cybersecurity on multiple fronts.
To help us understand the top trends in cybersecurity and to enable us to make informed decisions about mitigating cybersecurity risks, Gartner has unveiled its cybersecurity predictions and recommendations at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney.
With 2024 expected to be another banner year for GenAI, it's not surprising that many of Gartner's predictions are related to GenAI technology.
According to Gartner, the adoption of GenAI will bridge the skills gap by 2028 and minimize the occurrence of employee-driven security incidents. This has the potential to transform how organizations hire and train cybersecurity professionals. Gartner recommends organizations identify adjacent talent for more critical cybersecurity roles and that cybersecurity teams should focus on internal use cases to facilitate employees.
“As we start moving beyond what’s possible with GenAI, solid opportunities are emerging to help solve a number of perennial issues plaguing cybersecurity, particularly the skills shortage and unsecure human behavior. The scope of the top predictions this year is clearly not on technology, as the human element continues to gain far more attention.” Deepti Gopal, Director Analyst at Gartner.
Gartner also predicts that by 2026, enterprises that combine GenAI with an integrated platforms-based architecture in security behavior and culture programs (SBCP) will experience 40% fewer employee-driven security incidents.
Personalized engagement of employees is often an essential component of effective SBCP, and GenAI has the potential to take into account the employee's unique attributes to generate personalized content and training materials.
Organizations using customer information could face potential exposure to regulatory and legal implications. According to Gartner, cybersecurity leaders could face personal legal exposure due to new laws and regulations. Gartner predicts that by 2027, two-thirds of global 100 organizations will extend directors and officers (D&O) insurance to cybersecurity leaders.
Gartner also highlighted an opportunity for security and risk management (SRM) leaders to use GenAI in proactive collaboration with other business stakeholders to improve the overall enterprise cybersecurity performance. This should include taking a human-centric approach to reskilling existing security talent using GenAI to augment, not replace humans.
The staggering cost of data breaches has been highlighted by many reports, including an IBM study that showed that the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $ 4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years.
Gartner shared its prediction about the enormous cost of combating malinformation. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on battling malformation will surpass $500 billion, eating up more than 50% of cybersecurity and marketing budgets.
While GenAI is being used by enterprises to improve their cybersecurity performance, the same technology is used by bad actors to create and spread highly effective malinformation. To mitigate this threat, Gartner recommends Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) clearly define the responsibility for their enterprise's anti-malinformation programs and invest in tools and techniques to combat this issue.
As large language models (LLMs) use massive amounts of data and create more new data, GenAI applications can exacerbate the security and privacy risks. Organizations will have to deploy a multifaceted approach to creating a responsible AI framework. Additionally, stakeholders will need to come together for a comprehensive assessment of the impact of GenAI on enterprise cybersecurity and find solutions to address the issues.
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