The Changing Threat Landscape
Just as cyber defenses evolve, so do cyber criminals. They have made cyberattacks the fastest growing crime in the United States, and their attacks continue to become more sophisticated. When you pair this insight with our reliance on third party applications and cloud service providers, you understand that we’re more vulnerable than ever before.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has been collecting complaints since 2000. According to the 2018 Internet Crime Report, cybercrime complaints in 2018 rose to 351,937 from 301,580 in 2017, a 16.7% increase. Financial losses in 2018 rose to $2.7 billion from $1.4 billion in 2017, a whopping 91% increase. Cybercrime is a burgeoning business model, and the financial success criminals have had is nothing short of spectacular. Attacks on email (phishing) lead the pack with the highest dollar adjusted losses of over $1.2 billion in 2018. Tech support fraud, payroll diversion, and extortion, often requesting bitcoin in payment, are also hot trends for hackers.
How to Get Smarter
Simply put, we benefit when we think like a cyber-criminal and plan defenses around their tactics and attack methods. From leveraging threat intelligence to using computer modeling techniques, with the tools and data at our disposal, we can use an enlightened approach to security assessments to improve understanding of security posture and make more strategic security decisions. It’s an arms-race out there, and constant vigilance and evolving strategies are needed to win.
To learn more about how our smarter approach to security assessments can benefit your organization, please contact us.
Continued in Part II: Using Cyber Breach and Industry-Specific Data to Your Advantage
