Funny as it could be, but if it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totalling US$6 trillion globally by the end of 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. How ironical! Who would have imagined this?
As per Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cybercrime costs is predicted to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, and will reach US$10.5 trillion annually in 2025.
Whatever the cybercrime or cyber threat landscape it, the life goes on and in fact it is moving at a very fast pace. And, as a result, the creation of data doesn’t stop. According to the estimates, world will store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025. This includes data stored on private and public IT infrastructure, on private and public clouds, on personal computing devices etc.
There is definitely a huge expansion of cyber-attack surface that has taken place due to various factors including sudden spur in remote working as a result of pandemic, due to increasing use of IoT, and widespread supply chains. Another noticeable trend is that ransomware has now become default weapon for cyber criminals and attackers to extract money and inflict financial damages on both businesses and individuals. The threats to critical infrastructure are looming large and there have been several attacks globally that have come to light in past 2 years.
It’s truer than the truth that the digital transformation was really pushed by Covid19 and thus there was an imminent need to move individuals working in offices to working remotely from their homes. Some say that digital transformation was advanced by up to seven years. Naturally, the threat actors and cyber criminals took advantage of the chaos and changed their tactics to take advantage of these situations and disruption. The high-profile attacks like SolarWinds, Colonial Pipe, and Kaseya Corp were all results of this.
DynamicCISO spoke to Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, India & SAARC at Tenable. Kartik is a very popular face in the Tech and Security industry in India. From McAfee, to Dell/EMC to IBM to Xerox he has been there done that in last 25 years! We spoke about a lot of things including how Zero Trust and a secured Active Directory can save organisations from cyberattacks and damages.