For many companies and individuals, there is this misconcept that hackers are bad people and that security comes down to anti-viruses and firewalls that stop attackers.
First, individuals or groups with malicious intentions are usually called attackers. The words “Hacker” or “Hacking” are not a political or ethical stand point — they are qualifier for a skill set like “Attorney”, “Developer”, “Manager” are.
Secondly, there is NO silver bullet product for security — information security (also known as cyber-security) is a multi-layers approach to prevent AND respond to security breaches.
That’s why companies like JPMorgan spent $500M USD on cyber-security for 2016.
Currently, detection is a long and painful process, and cyber-crime/data-breach expensive to the global economy and companies.
- Average time attackers stay in a network before detection is over 140 days.
- Average cost of a data breach to a company is $3.5 million
- Estimated cost of cybercrime to the global economy is $500 billion
This problem is just going to get worse over the next 10 years, currently we see a rise of connected devices (Internet of Things) and technology isn’t part of our lives anymore. It is our lives.
Last year, Juniper Research concluded that the global cost of cyber-crime would quadruple — from $500M to $2Tn USD — by 2019 and earlier this year — Steve Morgan from CyberSecurity Ventures reported that the global cyber-crime cost will exceed $6Tn USD by 2021.
Do not let bad security practices ruin your holidays !