Cybercrime continues to be a growing threat and attack methods are constantly evolving. At the core of almost every successful cyberattack, one thing remains constant: a victim is persuaded in performing the desired action.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced most organizations to shift their workforces to remote work, often quite rapidly. Many surveys suggest that post-pandemic, a high proportion of the workforce will continue to work remotely.
What is Cybersecurity?
Rest assured: you’re not the first. According to the FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report , phishing, vishing, smishing, and pharming incidents topped the list of cybercrimes last year, having claimed 323,972 American victims and losses of $44,213,707 in total.
That’s four times the number of people who fell for non-delivery- and non-payment-type scams, the second most common cybercrime variety in the US, which signals an uptick of 182% from the 2019 phishing victim count.
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field, with cyber criminals adapting their skills and targets according to the maturity in security defenses being put in place by large organizations or the lax shown by some others in this space. Small and medium businesses are not spared as well. As technology advances, so do cyber criminals’ attack vectors and their means of exploiting the vulnerabilities.
Hackers and data miners continue to become more sophisticated, malicious and just plain greedy. Even the general public has become aware of security threats and incidents that splash across news headlines.
In other words, you don't have to be an enterprise IT pro to understand the latest security risks. That's the easy part.
A classic example is the tech support scam, and it comes in many varieties and levels of sophistication.
Over the past few years online service providers have been proactively messaging customers when they detect unusual activity on their users' accounts. Not surprisingly, cybercriminals have used this trend to their advantage. Many of the emails are designed poorly with bad grammar, etc. but others look legitimate enough for someone to click if they weren't paying close attention.
A host of new and evolving cybersecurity threats has the information security industry on high alert. Ever-more sophisticated cyberattacks involving malware, phishing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and more have placed the data and assets of corporations, governments and individuals at constant risk.
Internet users in recent years have seen the rise of two-step authentication processes, CAPTCHA tests asking you to identify all the buses in a set of images, and text or email alerts about new logins to your devices. These are all methods of combating the increase in cyberattacks and are examples of the impact of cybersecurity on daily life.
Every year I peruse emerging statistics and trends in cybersecurity and provide some perspective and analysis on the potential implications for industry and government from the data. While cybersecurity capabilities and awareness seem to be improving, unfortunately the threat and sophistication of cyber-attacks are matching that progress.
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