Generative AI and phishing lead concerns in new cybersecurity experts survey

According to a Q2 2024 study by Censuswide, commissioned by Bitdefender and carried out in several developed economies, the vast majority of security pros considers generative AI to be a threat to the businesses that their job is to protect.

74% of respondents express confidence in their IT departments' competence in shielding their online services from threats. Considering over a half of respondents also report having a security breach lately, their confidence appears somewhat ill-informed.

Misuse of AI is named as a real threat. Attacks involving so-called deepfakes, where very realistic AI-generated videos of people saying or doing things are used to get the victim to do what the attacker wants them to do, are on the rise representing a new breed of phishing attacks. It's phishing that tops the list of security experts' concerns, closely followed by poor software design making said software inherently vulnerable, ransomware attacks, and zero-day threats.

Additionally, the research indicates that just 45% of those tasked with taking care of the security matters carry out audits regularly.

As far as cloud security is concerned (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, mostly), incorrectly set IAM policies are the key concern.

The respondents all work for large corporations (with 1,000 employees or more) located in the United States of America, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and the United Kingdom, for reference.

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