Five Cybersecurity Trends for 2024, According to Hillstone Networks CTO Tim Liu

Based on commentary by Tim Liu, co-founder and CTO of Hillstone Networks

Cybersecurity vendor Hillstone Networks has released its yearly review from the CTO's Corner, in which co-founder and chief technology officer Tim Liu sets out the trends he expects to shape security in 2024. In his reading, the coming year will bring real change, with fresh challenges alongside fresh opportunities. Specialists are watching a handful of developments that could let new threats in, and that also invite new IT strategies to fight them. Liu picks out five.

AI brings new threat vectors along with the gains

Adoption of artificial intelligence took off in 2023 with the arrival of ChatGPT and similar tools, and Liu expects it to keep changing cybersecurity. AI offers more creativity, higher productivity and smoother workflows, but it also opens new routes of attack. He describes the field as a kind of "wild West", with regulation still taking shape, and sees that combination as a worry for data security. AI can also be turned to phishing and social engineering, where it helps attackers polish their methods, which makes defence harder still. The easier AI becomes to reach, the more pressing the question of whether it will be used for good or for harm, and Liu says the industry must keep a careful eye on the consequences.

Cloud responsibility is still misunderstood

Movement to the cloud shows no sign of slowing, driven partly by what enterprise AI projects need. Liu notes, however, that the shared responsibility model for cloud security and compliance is not grasped everywhere, and least of all among executives and boards. Security weaknesses in cloud instances run as shadow IT, together with oversights by IT teams who otherwise know what they are doing, keep cloud security problems alive.

More devices at the edge mean more ways in

The spread of edge devices is widening the area attackers can target at speed. Liu lists IoT hardware, facilities connected over 5G and electric vehicles that talk to networks. Conventional network defences, he argues, have to change so that they reach these new surfaces and entry points, which calls for security that covers the whole picture.

People remain a common point of failure

With so much attention on AI, the cloud and endpoints, Liu stresses that human behaviour is still one of the most frequent ways attacks succeed. Many incidents begin with something a person did, which is why the basics matter. Keeping systems updated, training staff and managing carefully are, in his view, essential to heading off threats. Cybersecurity, he concludes, is a problem about people as much as about technology.

Digital trust and a shift in security operations

As companies depend more and more on transactions carried out digitally, Liu considers it essential to earn digital trust and keep it. Security strategy feeds into that trust through an all-round security posture and changing disciplines such as Security Operations (SecOps). He points to SIEM and XDR as important for shifting organisations from a pre-breach to a post-breach posture, one centred on detection, response and mitigation. Newer approaches, including SASE and SSE, make the case for security that is unified and integrated.

Liu's overall message for 2024 is that security needs constant adjustment and fresh thinking. Technology is changing faster than ever, and he urges organisations to stay alert, put people at the centre of their security measures and adopt joined-up security strategies to cope with threats that keep shifting.