New Delhi, November 3 (IANS): Malicious attacks driven by artificial intelligence (AI) were the biggest emerging cybersecurity risk for enterprises in the third quarter of 2024, according to a new report.

According to a Gartner report, the criticality of IT suppliers and an unsettled regulatory and legal environment are new emerging enterprise risks.

According to Zachary Ginsburg, senior director, research at Gartner’s Risk & Audit Practice, while the upcoming US election generates headlines for the candidates’ regulatory, trade and other proposals, organizations are having trouble considering the real implications of risk from the many scenarios that could occur. .

“Amplifying this uncertainty are recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the authority of federal agencies to set and enforce regulations,” Ginsburg said.

Beyond politics, other global events, such as the CrowdStrike outage in July, have raised questions about whether organizations are relying too much on the biggest IT vendors.

“Because third parties, such as SaaS providers, rely on other providers, organizations may not realize the full extent of their exposure,” Ginsburg said.

Two of the top five most cited emerging risks are in the technology category, and two reflect political concern over uncertainty surrounding the regulatory and legal environment and global election results.

According to the report, the misaligned organizational talent profile dropped from the fourth most cited risk in the second quarter to the fifth most cited risk in the third quarter.

“Political and legal events can have complex risk implications, but events that depend on a defined set of outcomes, such as elections, are good candidates for scenario planning,” Ginsburg said.

If organizational leaders can generate specific, cost-effective actions that can meaningfully address risks during a risk event, these are the ones that have a high probability of mitigating risk as well as generating executive support .

“By going beyond specific risk events to assess organizational capacity to manage disruptions, enterprise risk leaders can both reduce their organizations’ exposure to identified risks and increase resilience to unforeseen events.” Ginsburg said.