Armis, a leading cyber exposure management and security company, recently unveiled their third annual Cyberwarfare Report – Warfare Without Borders: AI’s Role in The New Age of Cyberwarfare. Their findings carry a warning that AI-powered attacks are becoming “a supercharged cyber weapon”, which calls for organizations to be more proactive as attacks increase.
New data shows that threats have increased in the past year, with 73 percent of IT decision-makers expressing concern about nation-state actors using AI to develop more sophisticated and targeted cyberattacks. “AI is enabling nation-state actors to stealthily evolve their tactics to commit acts of cyberwarfare at any given moment,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and Co-Founder of Armis. “At the same time, threats are emerging at overwhelming rates from smaller nations and non-state actors leveraging AI to elevate to near-peer cyber threats.”
Armis also states that market consolidation, complex regulatory landscapes and gaps in legacy security tool stacks have challenged organizations’ abilities to stay ahead of threats. While many wish to implement AI-driven cybersecurity tools in a proactive manner, half of IT decision-makers surveyed acknowledge their teams lack the necessary expertise to implement and manage the technology.
Additional findings from this report include:
- 81 percent of IT leaders say moving to a proactive cybersecurity posture is a top goal for their organization in the year ahead, but 58 percent of organizations admit that they currently only respond to threats as they occur, or after the damage has already been done.
- 85 percent confirm that offensive techniques regularly bypass their security tools.
- 53 percent believe that their government can defend its citizens and organizations against an act of cyberwarfare, while 33 percent strongly agree that their own organization is prepared to handle a cyberwarfare attack and respond to related threats.
- Across the globe, IT decision-makers consistently point to three dominant state-sponsored threats: Russia, China and North Korea.
- 72 percent believe that the cyber capabilities of nation-state actors have the potential to trigger a full-scale cyberwar, with devastating consequences for global critical infrastructure.
The full report is available here.