Our CFO Rob Fong placed this article by CPO Magazine on my desk and in it, the latest cyber attack numbers are in. From the article, according to a new report from the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance (OTA), their Cyber Incident & Breach Trends Report shows that cyber crime became a $45Bn industry in 2018.
The numbers are staggering. To put this in perspective, although the number of overall incidents of cybercrime have actually decreased in almost all areas, the $45Bn stolen in 2018 represents over 1/3 of the TOTAL losses from cyber crime since 2013! As presented in an earlier blog, although ransomware saw a downturn in overall incidents, losses actually rose by 60%! The big trend that is becoming more apparent is that cyber criminals are moving away from the quantity of indiscriminate attacks against a lot of individuals and are focusing their attacks more specifically at businesses and organizations (such as municipalities and other government agencies) that they perceive to have more significant resources. We’ve seen the marked increase in ransomware attacks on municipalities and have blogged many many times about it. The big increases included ransomware and business email compromises (which itself skyrocketed from $677MM in 2017 to $12.5Bn in 2018!)
The big takeaway from the above is that a) cyber crime trends are up, b) hackers are honing in where they can get their biggest kill c) organizational readiness for dealing with these attacks remains dismal – of all the attacks that were perpetrated, “95% of these attacks were determined to be preventable”. And that’s the rub. Organizations are continuously behind the eight ball when it comes to attacks. Most of them continue to follow the Detect and Remediate way of doing things; with their security systems detecting attacks after they’ve already happened. Of course, this leads to expensive clean up and remediation efforts, which have just added to the 2018 totals.
At Wedge, we’re trying our hardest to do our part in trying to get these numbers down by continually evangelizing our “Detect and Block” approach. We always feel that if you can prevent your organization from being a victim, you’ll save a ton of money in the long run! So, how are you protecting yourself? If you haven’t taken us up on our FREE 90 Day trial of our Wedge Advanced Malware Blocker, that uses Deep Content Inspection, along with Orchestrated Threat Management using best-of-breed security solutions and AI to detect and block ALL malware in real-time, what are you waiting for? Contact us at:info@wedgenetworks.com so that you don’t become one of the 2019 statistic!!
