Key 2024 Cybersecurity Trends for Protecting User Privacy

Cybersecurity has become a hot topic post-2010. In the past decade, Internet users worldwide have reached 5.45 million, or around 67% of the planet's population. This staggering statistic is undoubtedly owed to the proliferation of smartphones, whose market, in the first quarter of 2024 alone, has grown by 7.8%, bringing the number of global active mobile devices to 7.2 billion.

Hence, almost everyone today connects to the World Wide Web in some fashion throughout a regular day. When an individual does this, they potentially get exposed to someone exploiting a vulnerability to steal monetary funds or illegally obtain their data for nefarious means. Naturally, if one has not protected oneself correctly or if adequate measures are not in place.

According to a recent Forbes article, in 2023, there were over 340 million victims of cyberattacks, with the number of data breaches jumping 72% compared to 2021. Here, we look to inform you of the latest trends in the cybersecurity sphere and what ordinary persons and businesses are utilizing to ensure that nefarious individuals do not take advantage of tech openings to deprive them of attained assets.

Zero Trust Architecture

Zero-trust architecture is gaining wide adoption but is not as talked about in the mainstream. It is a security framework that distances itself from perimeter-based security. It discards the belief that everything inside a network is safe and opts for the rule of thumb of always verifying and treating everyone/everything as potentially hostile.

No one gains automatic trust in this mode, as every access request is continuously verified/authenticated. That occurs even after it is granted to a section of an ecosystem or app. Verification mechanisms are employed throughout to ensure that the user's behavior remains consistent with expected patterns. When a red flag is raised, access becomes limited or banned.

Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, is the heart of zero trust. It can entail multiple forms of identification, including biometrics, with zero-trust frameworks also looking to confirm that accessing devices are trustworthy as they get inspected for security posture and policy compliance. System activity and network traffic also get monitored for irregularities, with access being governed by dynamic, context-based policies. There are no strict rules.

Boosted Focus on Data Minimization

What is data minimization? A principle guides services to collect only the directly relevant information necessary to complete a specific task. It is a condition expressed in the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union in this document's Article 5(1)(c). In that part of this regulation, it says that businesses who have customers from the EU should gather only adequate/relevant and limited to what is necessary data for processing so that they can provide their advertised product or service. Moreover, the information attained for this purpose will not be held longer than required for completion.

Even Internet gambling platforms, like legit online poker sites, follow the rules outlined in the EU's GDPR, and credible reviews of such hubs highlight the ones that do. Data minimization is beneficial both for businesses and users. For the first, it restricts their exposure to data-related risks, and for the latter, it safeguards their info from unauthorized use. Embracing this trend helps foster trust between these two parties in the data-driven era that we live in.

Behavioral Biometrics

We talked about multi-factor authentication above, and behavioral biometrics is a fairly new concept introduced into this realm. While everyone knows about biometrics, such as eye and fingerprint scans, this is a security tool that looks to identify individuals based on patterns in their behavior, not static physical attributes. Hence, it leverages user-specific behaviors, including mouse movements, typing speed, touchscreen gestures, and even navigation patterns.

It is a set of AI algorithms that studies how a user interacts with a device or system over time and then analyzes if they are dramatically breaking set patterns or engaging in continuous evolution. It is a seamless and non-intrusive method of authentication that happens in real-time and is difficult to fake. The problem with such software is that while it can be highly accurate, it is also prone to false positives or negatives. It cannot factor in if the displayed changes are due to factors such as stress or injury plaguing the user, causing him to act differently than he would normally.

Decentralized Identity Systems

When people hear the word decentralized nowadays, they think of crypto. However, blockchain technology can be used for more than asset transactions. Decentralized identity systems use this tech to deliver a privacy-respecting way of sharing only the necessary aspects of one's identity with third parties. They do this by creating a decentralized identifier (DID) using a digital identity wallet.

The DID gets registered on a blockchain, giving a verifiable identity to a user who controls it fully. Trusted organizations issue verifiable credentials to a user's wallet, which get cryptographically signed. When a user chooses to interact with a service provider, he can select to share only specific pieces of identity information, and a party can verify the user's identity claim by checking the blockchain for the corresponding cryptographic proof. The process does not involve the user's other personal data being exposed, nor can his data get handled by intermediaries.