Dimensional Data

As we navigate another year of consistent zero-day breaches, legislative pivots, the explosion of AI tooling and threat actors growing bolder and more desperate, it’s safe to say that getting comfortable with change is a requirement for thriving in the technology industry. We occupy a notoriously unpredictable space, but that’s half the fun. Compared to many other verticals, technology—especially cybersecurity—is relatively youthful, and the future should be something we can all look forward to blossoming in sophistication alongside the technology we swear to protect. So, what can we expect in the industry in 2024? We put our heads together, looked into our crystal ball, and these were the results: Government Regulations Around AI Will Turn the Industry Upside Down It was the talk of the conference circuit in 2023, with several high-profile presentations at Black Hat, DEF CON, Infosecurity Europe and many more warning of the explosive changes we can expect from AI implementation across every industry, especially cybersecurity. As tends to happen with low barriers to entry for such transformative technology, adoption has outpaced any official regulation or mandates at the government level. With significant movements in general cybersecurity guidelines and benchmarks around the world, including CISA’s Secure-by-Design and -Default principles in the U.S. and similar initiatives from the UK and Australian governments, it is essentially a foregone conclusion that regulations around AI use will be announced sooner rather than later. While much of the debate surrounding the mainstream use of AI tooling and LLMs has centered around copyright issues with training data, another perspective delves into how AI is best used in cybersecurity practices. When it comes to coding, perhaps its most human quality is its similar hardship in displaying contextual security awareness, and this factor is deeply concerning as more developers are adopting AI coding assistants in the construction of software. This has not gone unnoticed, and in a time of increased scrutiny for software vendors adopting security best practices, government-level intervention certainly would not surprise. … And Demand for AI/ML Coding Tools Will Create a Need for More Developers, not Less! Much has been written about the AI takeover, and for the better part of a year, we have been subject to a plethora of clickbait headlines that spell doom and destruction for just about every white-collar profession out there, and developers were not spared. After months of speculation and experimentation with LLMs in a coding context, we remain entirely unconvinced that development jobs are at collective risk. There is no doubt that AI/ML coding tools represent a new era of powerful assistive technology for developers, but they are trained on human-created input and data, and that has rendered the results far from perfect. Perhaps if every developer on the planet was a top-tier, security-minded engineer, we might see genuine cause for concern. However, just as the average adult driver vastly overshoots their ability (notice how everyone says they’re a great driver, and it’s always other people who lack skill? That’s a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect!), so too does the development community, especially when it comes to security best practices. According to one Stanford study into developer use of AI tooling, it is likely that unskilled developers using this technology will become dangerous. The study claimed that participants who had access to AI assistants […]