A ‘Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2018’ revealed that over four in ten (43%) businesses and two in ten (19%) charities in the UK suffered a cyberattack. The survey found that 38% of small businesses had spent nothing at all to protect themselves from cybersecurity threats. A separate survey also found that a third of UK small businesses are risking their online safety by operating at or below the “security poverty line”. The most frequent types of cyber-criminal activity were sending fraudulent e-mails and impersonating organizations online. Malicious e-mails were also found to be the most common type of cyberattack in the Internet Security and Threat Report. The consequences of cyber-crime are costly as the total average cost of a data breach in 2019 is $3.92 million in research conducted by the Ponemon Institute.
Explanation:
What is Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is making sure your organizations data is safe from attacks from both internal and external bad actors. It can encompass a body of technologies, processes, structures, and practices used to protect networks, computers, programs, and data from unauthorized access or damage. The goal of any cybersecurity strategy is to ensure confidentiality, data integrity, and availability.
There are several primary means by which cybersecurity issues can affect (or even destroy) an organization and its reputation. There is the risk that a hacker might obtain sensitive information such as bank account or credit cards details. There are open markets for such information on the “dark web”. If others access such sensitive information, the organization might find its banking or credit card facilities withdrawn or in breach of privacy laws. Each month high-profile security breaches impacting individual data are reported globally.
A second but related issue is that when a hacker obtains sensitive information about the organization it may find its reputation ruined. Few small organizations can survive the damage to its reputation that such lost data might cause. The damage to reputation and goodwill might be more crippling than the actual data loss itself. Loss of customer data may result in legal or regulatory action against the organization. A third party might file a suit against an organization as they have themselves incurred a loss. Organizations might also be subject to significant penalties and/or legal action arising from breaches of the privacy laws in many jurisdictions.
The most recent and alarming aspect of cybersecurity that causes considerable problems for organizations is ransomware. As early as 2012, reports of ransomware campaigns have adopted commercially focused business models. In many cases, a piece of malware is disguised and embedded within another type of document only waiting to be executed by the target user. Upon execution, the malware may encrypt the organization’s data with a secret 2,048-bit encryption key or communicate to a centralized command and control server to await instructions carried out by the adversary. Once infected, the organization’s data continues to be inaccessible as the encrypts the data using the attackers encryption key. Once all the data accessible is encrypted, including in many instances the backup data and systems, the organization will be instructed on how to pay a ransom within days, or the adversary will remove the encryption key and the data will be lost. Literally, the adversary holds the data to ransom—hence, ransomware. The encryption key is sufficiently strong enough that cracking the key instead of paying the ransom is uneconomic—some estimate that an average desktop computer would take five quadrillion years to decrypt the data without the key In some cases, the target organization can hope that some researchers may have discovered a way to decrypt the data based on a design flaw. Otherwise the organization will have to look to restore the systems and data from a safe back up or consider paying the ransom. Keep in mind that even data restoration does not eliminate the risk the ransomware will not be reenabled or return based on the compromised integrity of the environment.
