Cyber threats are accelerating in 2024, with global costs forecast to exceed 10.5 trillion dollars. This article examines the ten biggest cybersecurity trends businesses must prepare for, including AI-driven attacks and defences, the ongoing skills shortage, increasingly sophisticated phishing campaigns, and the elevation of cybersecurity to a board-level priority. Businesses can no longer treat security as a technical issue alone. Understanding the threat landscape and building proactive defences is now a strategic imperative for organisations of every size, with the consequences of inaction growing more severe each year.

New research from Sysdig reveals that cloud cyber attacks can be launched in under ten minutes of a credential being discovered, with five of those minutes attributable to dwell time. During opportunistic attacks, criminals find publicly exposed credentials in under two minutes and initiate an attack within 21 minutes. Attackers focus on identity and access management using credential access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement techniques. Analysis of 13,000 Docker Hub images identifies 819 as malicious, with 10% undetectable through static scanning alone. Telecommunications and finance sectors account for 65% of targeted cloud attacks, with resource hijacking and cryptomining among common attacker goals.

Microsoft Teams offers far more than basic messaging, and this guide walks through the platform’s most valuable features step by step. It covers mastering team chats with tags, pinned posts, and in-chat file sharing; setting up and customising channels to reflect business structure; integrating SharePoint for seamless document management; using meeting features for more productive video calls; and leveraging third-party app integrations to extend Teams’ capabilities. For businesses using Microsoft 365, taking full advantage of Teams is one of the most direct routes to improving collaboration, reducing email, and keeping work organised.

Microsoft has emerged as the biggest threat to cybersecurity incumbents, generating $15 billion in annual security revenue growing at 40% per year. The company competes directly with CrowdStrike, Okta, Splunk, and Palo Alto Networks by bundling security products into its Azure and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Analysts credit Microsoft’s bundling strategy, strong cloud-native product development, and leadership in identity and access management as key drivers of its market share gains. Microsoft 365 Defender uses AI and automation to detect and respond to threats across endpoints, email, applications, and identities, while the company plans to invest $20 billion in security over the next five years.

DeepSouth, a neuromorphic supercomputer scheduled to come online in April 2024 at Western Sydney University, is capable of performing 228 trillion operations per second, matching the estimated processing rate of the human brain. It is the world’s first machine capable of simulating brain-scale neural networks. Neuromorphic computing aims to replicate the brain’s structure and energy efficiency, offering a radically different approach to computation. Researchers believe this could unlock new insights into neuroscience and accelerate progress in artificial intelligence by enabling more biologically realistic models of cognition.

You rely on your IT systems every day, but when was the last time anyone really dug into how secure they are?

That’s precisely why, for a limited time between now and Christmas, we’re offering a FREE full Security Assessment for you and your organisation, worth £2,000.
We’re limiting places because there’s a genuine cost to running these assessments properly, and we only have capacity for 7 assessments before Christmas.