Page 97 - Cyber Defense eMagazine February 2024

Offensive Awakening: The 2024 Shift from

Defensive to Proactive Security

Adversarial Cyber Exercises Are The New Mandate

By Stephen Gates, Principal SME, Horizon3.ai

After observing the cyber threat landscape in 2023, in the coming year we're going to see a complete
mind shift throughout enterprises and government entities worldwide. The trend forcing this change in
thinking is the result of the massive number of successfully breached and subsequently extorted
organizations who either paid their ransoms or watched their operations come to a halt last year. Never
in the history of cybersecurity have so many organizations fallen to human-operated, ransom-based
attacks as seen in 2023.

So, what is the “about face” we can expect to see? Simple. Organizations will finally realize they can no
longer take a solely defensive approach to security. For decades, organizations have relied upon industry

Cyber Defense eMagazine – February 2024 Edition 97
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