Page 27 - Cyber Warnings

A gloomy vision of the future.

Kevin Coleman, Chief Strategist Independent Software, Inc.

In 2015 Symantec discovered more than 430 million new unique pieces of malware, up a
whopping 36 percent from the year before. If you decompose that figure, on average that
equates to slightly over 14 new strains each and every second. Can you imagine if your
antivirus software had to examine every file on your computer for those 430 million signature
files. Now think about all the time and updates that would be required to keep your antivirus up-
to-date.

By all indications 2016 was another record year for the release of new strains of malware. It is
no shock to find that Deltek’s Federal Information Security Market Report suggests that federal
agencies struggle to stay ahead of the cybersecurity threats. With figures like those just
presented, who could blame them?

But wait there’s more – much more! Gartner projected a total of 6.4 billion connected
"Things"(Internet of Things) would be in use in 2016. As we are all aware, the vast majority of
those IoT devices are unprotected and vulnerable to cyberattack.
In a 2016 cybersecurity report AT&T stated that there was “458 percent increase in the number
of times hackers searched Internet of Things connections for vulnerabilities.”

Did your budget and resources increase at the same 458% pace as the hacker IoT scans? No!
Did your budget and resources increase 36% like the malware did in 2015? No!

Consider this, a recently released report by Cybersecurity Ventures projected we are going to
spend over $1 trillion globally over the next five years. After all of that spending, they project the
losses due to cyberattacks and cybercrime will exceed $6 trillion.

One has to wonder if we did not increase spending like this report projects, what the losses
would be!

To recap the current situation, we don’t have the budget to keep pace with the ever increasing
number of cyber threats. Even if we did, where would we get the resources necessary for this
task.

One report states that it takes six month or longer to fill a cybersecurity vacancy. After all, they
are in short supply globally and it does not appear college enrollment in this specialty is keeping
up with demand.

Even if college enrollment and graduates were keeping pace, they have little or no practical
hand-on experience that is so critical in cyber security and defense. Oh, we should also not
forget that many of those in cybersecurity are entering retirement age, so this problem is likely
to get much worse.

27 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – April 2017 Edition
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