As we mark the end of cybersecurity awareness month, let's take a look at some of the cybersecurity trends we will see on the rise in 2024:

1. AI and Machine Learning in Security: The use of AI and machine learning for both defensive and offensive cybersecurity measures is likely to continue to evolve. AI-driven attacks and defenses will likely become more sophisticated.

2. Zero Trust Architecture: The adoption of a zero-trust security model is expected to increase, where no entity, internal or external, is trusted by default. This concept of continuously authenticating adds a thicker layer of security.

Application vulnerability scanning is an essential aspect of any organization's cyber resiliency strategy as it takes a proactive approach to help identify security vulnerabilities in software applications before they can be exploited by attackers.

The importance of application vulnerability scanning can be summed up as follows:

1. Identify vulnerabilities: Scanning helps identify vulnerabilities that exist in an application that could be exploited by hackers to gain unauthorized access or compromise the application's integrity. This allows organizations to take proactive measures to fix the vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
    
2. Compliance: Organizations are often required to comply with industry-specific regulations and standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which require periodic vulnerability assessments to be conducted.
    
3. Cost savings: The cost of remediating a vulnerability after an attack is significantly higher than the cost of identifying and fixing it proactively. Thus, application vulnerability scanning can save an organization a significant amount of money by reducing the risk of successful attacks.
    
4. Reputation: A successful attack on an organization's application can cause significant damage to its reputation, leading to a sense of distrust, a loss of customers, revenue, and shareholder value. By proactively identifying and fixing vulnerabilities, and having a strong, overall cyber resiliency plan, organizations can demonstrate a commitment to security and protect their reputation at all costs.

Overall, application vulnerability scanning is a crucial aspect of any organization's security strategy, helping to reduce the risk of successful attacks, save costs, and protect the organization's reputation.

The cyber threats landscape in the past few years has redefined how organizations secure and protect critical systems, assets, proprietary assets, and business and customer data. As a result, cyber resilience is not only an exclusive role of the IT and security professionals. Rather it is a company’s shared responsibility to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks to achieve operational sustainability and strategic viability. In the current volatile IT and digital environment, cyber resilience should comprise measures of how enterprises anticipate, identify, understand, and recover from the impacts of a cyberattack.

How can we secure the processes, facilities, technologies, systems, assets, networks, and services essential to the safety, health, or economic well-being of Canadians? How can we enhance the cybersecurity posture for critical infrastructure that can be interconnected and interdependent within and across provinces, territories, and national borders? Cyber-attacks and disruption of critical infrastructure could result in catastrophic loss of life, adverse economic effects, and harm to public confidence, as is the case with the Colonial Pipeline hack.

2020 brought unprecedented global changes and cyber security was no exception. From the widescale shift to remote working triggered by the pandemic, to the record-high cryptocurrency prices, to one of the worst cyber attacks of all time. The tools and tactics we started with in 2020 are no match for the threat landscape of 2021.