Why Businesses Need to Think Like Hackers This Year

2022 was a turbulent year for cybersecurity teams. Through the pandemic, cybercriminals took advantage of misaligned networks as businesses moved to remote work environments. Attacks globally increased by 125% through 2021 and continued upward in 2022. 

It’s clear old practices are no longer working. Defensive, reactive, and recovery postures aren’t fit-for-purpose in the face of an ever-evolving wave of sophisticated attacks. Outmanned, underskilled, and overwhelmed security teams are at the breaking point as they struggle to cope with this cyber “new normal.”

A new proactive offensive approach is needed to take the fight to cybercriminals rather than waiting to be hit. For security professionals, this means learning to think and act like a hacker.

Only by understanding the latest techniques and methods being used by bad actors, and continuously updating your skill set accordingly, can you hope to stay ahead of cybercriminals and find system vulnerabilities before they do.

The hacker mindset isn’t just for frontline security teams, though. It should be an organizational-wide shift in approach that’s all about looking ahead, using out-of-the-box thinking, and responding to threats creatively.

So this could be the HR team “hacking” its recruitment process by removing restrictive hiring criteria to unlock a new pool of cyber talent, just as much as it could be the cybersecurity team hacking its own network to find flaws in the code.

I’ve identified several potential danger areas that I believe will present challenges to businesses this year.

AI Algorithms

AI has made it onto the front pages recently with the success of ChatGPT and social media users sharing their new Lensa avatars across platforms. It’s safe to say that AI has reached consumers on all fronts and mass adoption isn’t unrealistic. At the same time, AI adoption within businesses has skyrocketed and will continue to do so. The cyber-risk with AI is that it’s an algorithm and, like any algorithm, it can be manipulated and hacked into.

Even a tiny change to AI can affect the output, and, generally, AI algorithms aren’t able to provide the reasoning behind their conclusions. Therefore, any manipulation to AI can be very difficult…