Providing a glimpse into the future of cybersecurity, Trend Micro presents Project 2030

Trend Micro Incorporated has launched a visionary report and a dramatised video series describing how the world may appear at the start of the next decade – and how the security sector might respond to rising criminal innovation.

By 2030, connectivity will have an impact on every area of everyday life, both physically and psychologically. Malicious threat actors will adapt to leverage and abuse technical innovation, which is expected as the threat landscape evolves. The research examines the world in 2030 from the eyes of a fictitious individual, a corporation, and a government. It provides a thorough examination of growing cyber threats and how they may affect security stakeholders.

“Today, AI, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have all found a commonplace in our daily lives. Therefore, we must remain vigilant in safeguarding our digital activities and equipping ourselves to successfully navigate through cyber-threats attempting to disrupt our digital experiences.,” said Dr. Moataz Bin Ali, Vice President and Managing Director, MEA for Trend Micro. “Project 2030 not only provides predicted scenarios in a new digital era but also prepares us for cybersecurity challenges that are less than a decade away. This report reflects our commitment and provides invaluable guidance for enterprises and communities in the region to further secure their digital journeys for a better tomorrow”

Among the predictions in the report are:

• AI tools democratize cybercrime on a whole new scale to individuals with no technical skill
• Attacks cause chaos with supply chains and physical harm to humans through their cyber-implants
• Social engineering and misinformation become more visceral and harder to ignore when delivered via ubiquitous Heads Up Displays (HUDs)
• Massive IoT (MIoT) environments attract sabotage and extortion attacks targeting manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, education, retail, and the home environment
• AI-powered confusion makes attribution virtually impossible, pushing the security industry’s focus towards incident response and IAM at the edge
• 5G and 6G connectivity everywhere drive more sophisticated and precise attacks
• “Everything as a Service” turns cloud providers into hugely lucrative targets for cyber-attackers
• Grey markets emerge for those that want tools to confound workplace monitoring
• Techno-nationalism becomes a key geostrategic tool for some of the world’s most powerful nations, with the gulf between them and the have-nots widening further

The new report, a successor to Trend Micro’s acclaimed 2012 report, Project 2020, was produced using open-source information, vendor threat landscape studies, scholarly abstracts, patents, an invitation-only online survey, and a CISO poll. The film dramatisation of the study is intended to be an engaging, amusing approach for organisations to visualise the future and consider how they will need to adjust to new realities.