As the New Year dawns, a cybersecurity report from Google Cloud suggests that while there are many challenges ahead, it will also become simpler for cybersecurity teams to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to better defend IT environments.

John Hultquist, chief analyst for Mandiant Intelligence for Google Cloud, said in the coming year, the size, scope and speed at which cyberattacks will be launched is going to accelerate significantly as cybercriminals exploit new technologies to evolve their tactics and techniques.

For example, cybersecurity teams should expect a significant increase in phishing attacks that will be more difficult to detect because they have been crafted with the aid of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In addition to fewer misspellings and grammatical errors, generative AI will make it simpler for cybercriminals to create fake content and mimic legitimate content such as invoices, the report noted.

The volume of these types of attacks is also likely to increase during a year when presidential campaigning will increase as nation-states look to influence the outcome of the election, according to the report. At the same time, as additional global conflicts emerge, both the level of hacktivism and attacks aimed at critical infrastructure will also increase, the report found.

Ultimately, it is likely to become more difficult for businesses and governments to engage with audiences that will become increasingly skeptical of any online content, the report suggests.

In addition, the number of attacks using zero-day vulnerabilities is going to increase. Cybercriminals are attempting to maintain access to an environment, especially at the edge where devices are difficult to monitor, for as long as possible. As a result, they are investing more time and effort to exploit unknown vulnerabilities, the report notes.

Espionage groups will be creating disposable “sleeper botnets” out of vulnerable internet-of-things (IoT), small office, home office (SOHO) and end-of-life devices and routers that will be invoked as needed and discarded once discovered, the report also added.

Cyberattacks against multi-cloud computing environments will also become more challenging to discover and thwart, the report predicts. Cyberattacks will increasingly cross cloud boundaries, starting with cryptominer attacks that have already been discovered on serverless computing infrastructure, notes the report.

Developers of malware are also expected to embrace modern programming languages such as Go, Rust, and Swift which will make it easier for them to write code faster is also going to be more challenging to reverse engineer, the report also warns. At the same time, more attacks will be specifically aimed at software supply chains in the hopes of injecting malware into any number of downstream applications running in production environments, noted the report.

On the plus side, the report also notes that thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), it should become easier to reverse engineer malware code faster. In addition, more organizations in 2024 will be consolidating IT and security operations to make up for the current shortage of cybersecurity expertise. AI also gives junior security analysts a leg up they previously lacked, noted Hultquist.

Finally, if all else fails, the report projects the cost of cyber insurance should fall in 2024 as more providers of policies emerge in the coming year.

It’s hard to predict with any absolute certainty how the tactics and techniques being employed by cybercriminals will evolve in the coming year but the one thing that is certain is the number of types of attacks being launched will range from slight modifications of existing vectors to whole new classes of generative AI attacks that will require similar advances in AI to detect and thwart.