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Security for less than $500 a month

Cybersecurity companies tend to target large enterprises because, that’s where all the money is. supposedly. They may be missing a lucrative bet and a solution to AI-generated attacks.

In 2025, Comcast issued a report that said 95% of all cyber breaches began with someone in an organization clicking on a malicious link. It wasn’t a brilliant hacker breaking through military grade encryption, or a rogue LLM from a major AI platform discovering backdoors. It was someone not paying attention to the warning signs.

Security training is supposed to reduce that by making users more aware of those signs. That is being tested by AI-generated phishing programs massively increasing the number of attempts. A Hoxhunt survey estimated Ai has caused a 14X increase in phishing attempts in the past year.

Stopping the inevitable

The question is, with cybersecurity hitting a $328 billion market size, why is it getting worse?

Benny Czarny, CEO of OPSWAT, answers that question in a new book, “Upside Down Cybersecurity” that just came out. “The reality is that the market is not adopting this technology or it’s underlying concept fast enough.”

To be accurate, Czarny is talking about OPSWAT’s content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) technology, but based on talks with dozens of CEOs and CISOs at the RSAC Conference in April, the same complaint is made by every company in cybersecurity.

Essentially, the customers that haven’t bought into a cybersecurity service or tool is stupid. They don’t say that for publication, but they do say it. They may be missing another reason. Cybersecurity companies don’t know how to sell their products and services to the people that most need them. Conversations with customers at RSAC back that up.

Untapped SMB market

A 2022 McKinsey survey showed small to medium businesses (SMBs) represent a total market of $1.5 trillion to $2.0 trillion. That market is generally ignored in favor of Fortune 1000 companies. Moreover, the survey noted that current commercial solutions do not meet needs of SMBs and mid-market companies.

(It should be noted that McKinsey’s numbers are based on an erroneous 1998 report on the cost of the cybercrime that was overstated by a factor of between 5 and 10 times the actual number. Official total of cybercrime total less than $1 trillion, making the total available market need at less than that.)

That’s a meaningful response to Czarney’s complaint. OPSWAT’s focus is on big infrastructure. Their pricing is not transparent because, as the saying goes, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” That limits OPSWAT’s market to less than 150 customers and, as he said, they are making a good living off of it. OPSWAT and the majority of the industry are still, however, leaving billions of dollars on the table.

There is evidence that better training makes a difference. Security behavior-change programs, as opposed to traditional awareness model, employees recognized and reported social engineering attacks with a 6x improvement in 6 months, and reduced the number of malicious clicks by 87%, according to a recent report by Hoxhunt. The key, however, may be providing services that block malicious links or alert users to potential danger and with little to no cost to an organization. Encouragingly enough, there are services that do exactly that.

Security at $500/month

DNSFilter processes about 170 billion DNS queries daily, blocking 200 million categorized threats. That’s millions of phishing campaigns failing to reach targets That's significant volume. They also claim to block threats an average of 10 days faster than traditional threat feeds. Significantly, their pricing model starts at $240 a year, for up to 20 users up to a minimum of $1080 per year for a large enterprise. This easily fits into the Cyber Protection Magazine Security Under $500 a Month classification.

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AI industry at a crossroads

The AI industry appears to be reaching a crossroads that will determine its future in the next two years. The only clear outcome is it will not be what it is now, nor what it is predicted to be.

Most doomsayers and cheerleaders largely agree on a single vision: The technology will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. Wealthy investors and captains of industry consider that a good thing and mumble about universal income legislation and Star-Trekkian futures. White-color workers and unions see the future less optimistically. But cooler heads see a precarious future. Those cooler heads include Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Chat GPT, and X.ai’s Grok. Cyber Protection Magazine talked to all three, and they all came up with four likely scenarios that may be brewing even as this article is read.

A security breach or a major AI system collapse.
Technical plateau causing diminishing returns on scalability.
Strict regulatory legislation that stifles innovation and makes development too expensive to pursue.
A significant economic downturn or massive market correction drying up capital investment.

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The problem with proxies

Proxies are absolutely crucial to the operation of the internet, but they also represent a clear and present danger to users. Finding that balance is pretty much a full-time job for cybersecurity. The recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure outages are good examples of that.

Amazon explained the outage was caused by “failing intermediaries” monitoring system health, preventing proper traffic routing. Another word for intermediaries is “proxies”. When the monitoring subsystem malfunctioned, health check updates were not propagated properly, causing backend servers to appear offline even when they were active, which invalidated DNS lookups. This created a cascading failure.
Likewise, the Azure outage was caused by a misconfiguration of the proxy Front Door, a global entry point for content delivery network functionality, load balancing, and application acceleration.

How Proxies Function

When a user wants to access a website, the request goes to the proxy server instead of going directly to the internet. The proxy server receives the request, then forwards it to the target website. It modifies the request header to hide the user's original IP address.

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Pig butchering: Proving the Luddites right

Pig-butchering may be proving the Luddites were right. The social-engineering scam bypassed ransomware as the most profitable cybercrime approximately two years ago. After government regulations and law enforcement took a big bite out of returns for ransomware this past year, public-private partnerships are taking aim at the new champ.

TL;DR
* Pig butchering eclipses losses from ransomware
* Top targets are tech savvy people under 50
* Human error trumps cyber awareness
* Public/private partnerships making inroads at dismantling scam operations
* Tips to avoid scams
* Podcast with Arkose CEO
Between 2020 and 20023, scammers reaped more than $75 billion from victims around the world. Approximately 90 percent of the losses came from of purchasing fraudulent cryptocurrency, according to the US Treasury Department’s, Financial Crimes Enforcement Center. In comparison, ransomware attacks in that same period harvested $20 billion worldwide in ransoms and cost approximately another $20 billion in recovery costs.

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Breach fatigue or too big to fail?

As we prepare for the annual October holiday season with Cybersecurity Awareness Month there is an important question to ask. Are we as a society at the point of fatigue over every new security breach, or are the companies getting breached just too big to fail?

Security giant Fortinet announced a data breach this week that was remarkable in two ways. One was how small the breach was (less than 500GB) Two was how calm Fortinet seemed to be about. Security gadfly Dr. Chase Cunningham posted a flippant comment about the breach on Linkedin, encouraging his followers to “buy on the breach.” He pointed out that with big public companies, in security or not, generally take a hit on their stock for a day or two after a breach, but the stock rises to new highs as the dust clears. And no one seems to care about the downstream customers whose data might have been stolen.

A 2010 study published in the Journal of Cost Management concluded that a company could be more profitable if it annoyed unhappy customers more than they already were. The success of that strategy increased with the size of the company, according to the study, and when there were fewer competitors for a customer to turn to.

The reasons for the success were simple. If a pissed off customer decided to go a smaller provider, there were always new customers who signed up, simply because they were the biggest. If there were no smaller competitors, the customer never went away. In the process, the offending company rarely has to pay out to make the customer whole. The study pointed our that companies like United Airlines have notoriously bad customer service, but they rarely lose market share because of it.

Kevin Szczepanski, co-chair of Barclay Damon's Data Security, is much more forgiving

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