What does not kill organizations makes them stronger. Here are nine such cyber risks that will awaken the world next year

With another year of spectacular crypto and cyber incidents behind us, what other state-sponsored cybercrimes, cyberwar tactics and digital money scams can we not look forward to in 2023?

Nine senior spokespersons from Imperva offices around the world have taken the time to contribute one prediction each, to form a sort of global perspective for readers’ edification.

Reinhart Hansen, Director of Technology – Office of the CTO	Online fraud will aggressively increase in volume and transactional value as cybercriminals utilize AI/ML combined with targeted bots and automation. There will be a rapid increase in the use of deep fake technology to commit online fraudulent activities. An increase in account-takeover attacks is likely, and global crackdowns on the creation and usage of fake accounts and profiles (check the Twitter acquisition saga) for data mining and fraudulent activities are implicated. With fake accounts harder to come by, cybercriminals will look to leverage easily compromised existing user accounts to commit online fraud activities. Finally, as industries that have invested in mainframe technology for decades will attempt to modernize the mainframes and data, mainframe data breaches will start to occur.
George Lee, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan	Doing more with less: In projecting doom and gloom next year, many organizations will be more frugal. CISOs will need to be smarter about their investment choices and double down on automation, AI and ML to increase team efficiency and augment headcount. It will also force leaders to reassess their cybersecurity stack and find ways to consolidate. Wise money will be spent on cloud native platforms and fabrics instead of point solutions to reduce total cost of ownership, maintenance and training while future-proofing and simplifying operations. More financial fraud ahead: Asia has traditionally had a large unbanked and underbanked population, but this is changing with the rise of digital banks and new digital payments such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). Cybercriminals will always follow the money, and we expect these new services to proliferate online fraud such as account take-over and new account fraud, as well as digital skimming attacks like Magecart.
Ryan Windham, Vice President, Application Security	We will see a sharp increase in business-logic-layer attacks over the next 12 months. There is huge value in attacking objects that execute business functions or provide access to sensitive systems and data, and many of the traditional rule-based security paradigms lack the behavioral and contextual awareness to offer reliable protection. There is growing evidence of hackers deploying ML to automatically recognize and evolve to defeat various defensive tools. Without ML-enabled security solutions that can identify and respond in real-time, organizations will be left dangerously exposed.
Lynn Marks, Senior Product Manager	Bad bot operators will increasingly mask their malicious intent by using residential proxies and exploiting connected IoT devices to appear as human users by rotating bulk IP services in their requests. Most bot solutions will avoid blocking these IPs to avoid false positives. This makes it even harder for businesses to detect and stop automated traffic. As this trend has grown, more businesses are finding that bad bot traffic is associated with residential proxies. Such a trend will in turn present new online fraud challenges for organizations, rendering basic security defenses useless. Two-thirds of all bad bot traffic in 2023 will be considered moderate or advanced, making the automation harder to detect and stop. This breed of sophisticated bot will increasingly be able to conduct online fraud attacks such as account takeover, inventory scalping, and more. Also, APIs will become the prime target for bad bots in 2023. Because API security defenses often overlook automated threats, bots will become a persistent challenge next year, and generate more scrapping attacks on individual APIs that lead to data leakage. The challenge is that returning a CAPTCHA challenge to an API request breaks the calling application. Thus, machine learning will be needed to differentiate normal API behavior from malicious traffic, and to understand what data should be transmitted through the API. Therefore, it will be hard for organizations to mitigate automated attacks targeting their API libraries until bot management and API security are used in concert
Lebin Cheng, Head of API Security	As organizations become more pragmatic in their approaches to cloud migration, hybrid and multi clouds will be widely adopted. This means that cloud security tools need to support the same flexibility, or they will be replaced by tools that can. APIs will be the new Web. There will no longer be distinction between API security and Web security. Security Operations, Platform Operations, Dev and DevOps will increase collaboration, enabled by maturing automation tools and processes.
Tim Chang, VP Global Sales Engineering	Organizations will continue to look for ways to optimize their opportunities for growth through increased technology innovation such as leveraging APIs, adopting modern data stores and making more use of cloud services. Existing cybersecurity controls will be reviewed and replaced by platforms that can offer robust security across multiple security categories, are easy to deploy, and that protect apps, APIs and data on-premises or in the cloud.
Tony Mascarenhas, Area Vice President (Australia & New Zealand)	API usage and traffic will continue to accelerate, driven by the trend towards cloud-native app development, as well as a concerted push by governments and industry for greater data sharing and portability. Cybercriminals will follow this trend and exploit more and more API vulnerabilities. In this classic tale of good and evil, development and security teams will need to join forces in the fight to secure their API usage and traffic will continue to accelerate, driven by the trend towards cloud-native app development, as well as a concerted push by governments and industry for greater data sharing and portability. Cybercriminals will follow this trend and exploit more and more API vulnerabilities. In this classic tale of good and evil, development and security teams will need to join forces in the fight to secure their
Marty Overman, Senior Vice President, (North America)	As nation states wage their cyberwars DDOS attacks will continue to increase in frequency, severity and duration, employing distraction techniques while they do their real damage with data exfiltration campaigns. With the perceived impending recession and the costs incurred to facilitate hybrid working, there will be far more scrutiny on IT and cyber spending than ever seen in the past couple years. Returns on Investment projections will need to readily achieved, the total cost of ownership proven out, and projected positive business outcomes must be substantial and tangible. Cybersecurity will continue to be a necessity, but firms will expect it to be built in, not added on.
Andy Zollo, Regional Vice President, EMEA	This year we will start to see large enterprises question the bundled security tools on offer from cloud providers. Such solutions initially appear easy to use but enterprises are finding that the tools fail to provide the essential capabilities to properly protect data in the cloud. Also, as more data moves into the cloud, we will see demand for tech skills shift once again. Since there will be less cause for people to go down to the data center to manually address problems. Yet, businesses are starting to understand that moving data to the cloud means a loss of control, and so they will be desperate to find people with strong operational capabilities that can help them handle this fundamental shift in a way that does not result in unexpected costs or unpleasant security surprises.