With economic instability, geopolitical conflicts around the world and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, organizations need to be well prepared for an increase in cybersecurity attacks in 2023.

During the year 2022, cyberattacks in all industrial sectors had a increase of 28% in the third quarter compared to the same period of 2021. An increase is expected increase this year, being driven by ransomware intrusions — “hijacking” of servers with ransom demands — and hacker attacks.

The year 2022 was terrible for cybersecurity in Portugal starting on the 2nd of January, with a computer attack by the Lapsus$ group on the Grupo Impresa, which prevented access to TVI and newspaper websites and the OPTO platform, also affecting internal systems and the information archive.

On 7 February, it was Vodafone Portugal's turn to suffer a cyberattack, having had an impact on the mobile communications of thousands of companies, leaving the country in a state of alert.

These organizations are joined by others that suffered large-scale attacks and were the target of information theft, such as Sonae MC, Hospital Garcia da Horta, the Lusa agency, the i newspaper and Nascer do Sol, TAP, the Sporting and FC Porto websites, BCP and Loures City Council. Many others could be added in Portugal and internationally, with an impact on the operation of companies and the theft of customer data.

The rise of these attacks shows no signs of slowing down as the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine continues to profoundly impact this scenario worldwide.

Cybersecurity predictions for 2023 will focus on four categories:

• Increase in malware and phishing attacks (ransomware shows no signs of letting the industry rest in the year 2023). This was the main threat for organizations in the first half of 2022 and is expected to continue to grow in 2023.
• Hacker attacks (in the past year, the number of these attacks has evolved from social groups like Anonymous to state-backed groups that are more organized, structured and sophisticated).
• Use of collaborative tools to disseminate attacks (protect corporate networks against information leaks).
• Deepfakes (they use Artificial Intelligence to change the faces of people in videos, synchronize lip movements, expressions and other details, in some cases with very convincing results).