Emerging Cybersecurity Challenges

This chapter examines the current cybersecurity landscape, emphasizing the growing threats posed by advanced persistent threats (APTs) and their characteristics of persistence, stealth, and sophistication. It reviews representative APT incidents and extends the discussion to major attacks across critical sectors such as energy, petrochemicals, smart manufacturing, defense, water utilities, healthcare, transportation, and IoT. Conventional defense approaches—including Honeypots, honeyfiles, Web Application Firewalls, and honeytokens—are analyzed, along with their limitations in addressing adaptive adversaries. Finally, key scientific issues and technical challenges, namely data snooping, sampling bias, and temporal snooping, are identified as central barriers to effective cyber defense (This chapter was supported by the Strategic Research and Consulting Project of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (No.2023-JB-13)).