Is Cybercrime Increasing and what to do to protect your organization? | Storm Internet

The Internet is constantly evolving and this presents organizations with the opportunity to adapt to new technologies quickly and oftentimes this fast adaptation of new technologies provides big risks along with big opportunities.

One of these big risks is Cybersecurity breaches and cyber-attacks.

You can barely open a web browser without seeing a news story about a new cyber threat, data breach, or cyber crime rising out of what’s known as the “malspace” which is the online environment frequented by hackers, cybercriminals and espionage players. The infrequent attacks are a reminder that theses groups are out there gathering information constantly.

As a business owner it makes sense to develop a sort of tunnel vision related to what you have to do right now! But this myopia can often distract you from the legitimate threats that are out there scheming to attack your organization and undo all the good work you’ve done!

Recently the big news has been that a Russian organization has come into possession of a database of stolen Internet credentials for 1.2 billion accounts.  This is the believed to be the largest hack/data breach ever with another 500 million email addresses believed to be corrupted as well.

Cybercrime is something we will all have to deal with.

The Internet provides an attractive hunting ground for criminals, terrorists and spies. Organizations need to prepare themselves for attacks from any of these fringe style groups.

A recent report by Cyber-security giant McAfee showed that cybercrime is an industry with high returns and low risks. In the same report, McAfee estimated that cybercrime is responsible for a loss of over 400 billion worldwide.

A number that is larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of some countries.

Regulatory requirements and the unstoppable evolution of technology, combine with the increases in compliance costs to create a perfect storm for internet security breaches. Disconnecting from cyberspace is not an option but the risks of existing in the digital environment continue to grow.

Increasing the tension are senior executives who don’t understand the Internet and take on more risk than they intend to due to their ignorance. The organizations run by such executives inevitably end up having more embarrassing incidents, and end up with longer lasting impacts from cybercrime than their younger more cyberspace savvy colleagues. If your organization is headed up by an executive who is not internet savvy, be sure to surround him with young junior executives who can keep him up to date on the latest security threats.

Furthermore cyber risks trickle down, if a company cannot be trusted to maintain an environment then their overall level of customer trust is sure to follow.

Why Cyber-Security Is Not Enough

Even establishing basic cybersecurity protocols is no longer enough. The problem is that you can only protect against the known risk factors or opportunities for cybercriminals that already exist. The evolution of opportunities and risk online is far outpacing the level of security measures, which can be employed against it. Organizations need to move past cybercrime prevention into the idea of risk resilience or the ability to respond to and mitigate any damaging impacts of a cyber attack. Risk resilience works before an attack happens, during an attack and after it.

No matter how hard you work to protect yourself and your organization, cyber attacks will happen. You can’t afford to hide your head in the sand and pretend that cyber attacks are things which happen to other people. The same way that you buy insurance and call a cab when you’ve had too many drinks, you need to protect yourself from the inevitability of a cyber attack.

Risk resilience builds in a degree of uncertainty, as it is impossible to predict the future especially online. Instead of trying to predict every attack that may or may not come, risk resilience keeps pace with and anticipates increasingly sophisticated threats, which bubble up out of the “malspace.” Risk resilience lets go of the need to anticipate every attack and instead protects the organization and the system as best it can from the threats that exist, and those which are soon to be developed.

The ultimate goal of risk resilience is to make sure that the organization is sustainable and successful, before, during and after a cyber attack.

The Need To Re-Examine Assumptions

When implementing a risk resilience protocol, the first thing an organization must do is re-assess the assumptions that have been made about the Internet. These assumptions must be discarded in order to accept a new paradigm for interacting online.

For example, one threat may be the failure of one of the basic tenets of Internet security; encryption. In the event of an encryption failure, your risk resilience plan needs to take immediate action as a failure to address this situation offers a major threat to the security of your information.

In addition to re-examining assumptions and establishing emergency protocols, your resilience protocols need to be examined regularly because cybercriminals are always going to be well ahead of information security.

There will always be more money and incentives on the side of the criminals, and many times information security professionals are content to respond and “Patch and plug” various threats and problems without ever getting out in front of the problem. This problem is exasperated by the regulatory restrictions and budgets of government agencies which cybercriminals are not bound by.

Another problem for organizations is the human factor. People will always be the weakest link in any information technology chain and social hacking has consistently been show to be more successful than cyber hacking. When organizations think of threats from within, they generally think of bad actors that act out against the best interest of the company, but often times these bad actors have been socially hacked and are simply ignorant.

The world has changed and cyber attacks and data breaches are the rule, not the exception. Organizations that are able to respond creatively and effectively will have a quantifiable business advantage over those that do not. The first step is to stop relaying on risk avoidance and switch over to a corporate attitude of risk resilience. By creating risk resilience plan and team, you will be able to roll out realistic, broad, collaborative solutions to your cybersecurity and resilience problems.

Remember it’s no longer about cyber security; it’s all about risk resilience throughout your entire organization!

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