Today businesses face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that necessitate robust security measures. One such innovative approach gaining traction is the Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS). This model offers organizations the opportunity to enhance their security operations efficiently and effectively by leveraging external expertise and advanced technologies.
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As legislatures around the world try to get a handle on the growth of ransomware, another category of cybercrime is festering out of control: Elder fraud.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported more than 100,000 people in the US, 60 years and older, lost $3.4 billion total to digital scams. The IC3 pointed out that the elderly are half as likely to report a loss. So the actual crimes and losses are probably much higher.
In contrast, the total ransomware payouts last year from reporting companies was $1.1 billion according to Chainanalysis. While the total number of fraud reports to the IC3 appears to have leveled off after years of growth, elder fraud increased by 14 percent year on year.
“Combatting the financial exploitation of those over 60 years of age continues to be a priority of the FBI,” wrote FBI Assistant Director Michael D. Nordwall, who leads the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, in the report. “Along with our partners, we continually work to aid victims and to identify and investigate the individuals and criminal organizations that perpetrate these schemes and target the elderly.”
Who is vulnerable?
Richard Starnes, CISO at Six Degrees, discusses the increasingly pivotal role of today’s CISOs and why, in the face of growing danger from an ever-expanding variety of cyber-attacks, every modern enterprise needs one in place.
The cybersecurity industry seems addicted to research but isn’t all that good at it. Mining the massive amount of data produced is daunting but crucial to everyone.
Surveys and studies are an important part of marketing form the cybersecurity industry. Cyber Protection magazine receives a lot of them. We read them all. In the two months before the RSA Conference, more than one a day came into our inbox. However, they are not a great source of independent data and insight.
Ignoring the cherry-picked data highlighting a particular company’s product or service, there are a few nuggets that, taken together, produce some interesting insights. Out of 60+ reports, we took a pass on any that were repetitive, were suspect methodologically, or effectively plagiarized from another source. We chose to look at seven with a solid methodology, representation of industry-wide concerns, and originality. The reports came from Dynatrace, Black Kite, SlashNext, Metomic, Originality AI, Logicgate, and Sophos. We found three common themes: The impact of AI on security, government regulation compliance, and understanding of security concerns on the C-suites and board levels.
Understanding security issues.
Almost every study has a common complaint. CISOs say application security is a blind spot at the CEO and board levels. They say increasing the visibility of their CEO and board into application security risk is urgently needed to enable more informed decisions to strengthen defenses.
However, Dynatrace’s study said CISOs fail to provide the C-suite and board members with clear insight into their organization’s application security risk posture. “This leaves executives blind to the potential effect of vulnerabilities and makes it difficult to make informed decisions to protect the organization from operational, financial, and reputational damage.”
Recent news shows the study may have a point. Marriott Hotels admitted that a 2018 breach was the result of inadequate encryption of customer data. In 2018 the company claimed their data was protected by 128-bit AES encryption when customer identity was only protected by an outdated hashing protocol. One can imagine the discussion between the CEO and the IT department:
CEO: is our data encrypted?
IT manager: Yeah, sort of.
CEO: OK, good enough
If the CEO doesn’t understand the difference between a hash and AES encryption, that’s a problem.
And there many be evidence that ignorance is widespread. Apricorn reported that the number of encrypted devices in surveyed companies had dropped from 80 percent to 20 percent between 2022 and 2023. Some of that could be attributed to work-from-home (WFH) growth in companies. It is also likely that companies over-reported what was encrypted simply because they did not understand what “encryption” meant. Once they learned the meaning, adjustments were made.
That lack of a foundational security technology could be a reason for the devastating growth in ransomware in the past two years.
We are at an inflection point in the US Congress. For decades technology companies have been given free rein to advance and innovate without concern for the negative impact of what they produce. That honeymoon seems to be over, but their lobbying power has kept the weight of regulation relatively far from them.
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee advanced the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, also known as the FIT Act, to the House floor for debate and approval.
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The name WannaCry still invokes memories of chaos and disaster amongst anyone in the technology world. The anniversary of this widespread attack in May each year has been named Anti-Ransomware Day, to encourage organisations to back up their data and adopt necessary security protections.
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From our Cyber Insurance Issue: In today’s interconnected digital world, there is no such thing as an “unconnected” business. That means for most that the extent of their online exposure will include running a calculated risk of becoming the victim of a cyber-attack because that event risk can never be zero. Or does i
There are many themes arising for the RSA Conference next week including tools and services to protect against originating with unsecured third parties in the supply chain. That is a crucial issue in every industry especially with almost every company doing business with a supplier in the cloud. But the scope of the problem is almost impossible to resolve. The reasons are myriad.
With every Fortune 1000 business and government agency doing business with tens of thousands of third-party suppliers, the odds of finding one chink in the security protocols are very good for the criminals and state actors looking to do damage.
Social engineering can easily bypass the strongest technical defenses. It only takes a single lapse in digital hygiene to open the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, invite malware injections, and launch credential stuffing. It is also the favorite strategy of ransomware gangs.
Ransomware grabs headlines and remains highly lucrative for ransomware gangs. When compared to other forms of cybercrime, however, ransomware is really a minor issue. There are more than 33 million small businesses (under $100 million in revenue) operating in the United States alone representing 99 percent of all businesses. However, according to a study produced by the Black Kite Research and Intelligence Team, less than 5000 of them experienced a successful ransomware attack in the last 12 months...