Saturday, January 9, 2016

2016: Cyber-Crime Becomes Big-Time

"2016 will see cybercrime finally find its place in our official statistics," says KPMG's cyber security technical director, David Ferbrache, "extortion attacks have been making a comeback with criminals demanding significant sums for suspending denial of service attacks against targets; not going public with stolen data; and of course providing a ‘service’ which grants access to a ‘client’s data which they had previously hacked and encrypted."

“While phishing attacks, banking Trojans and large scale low value cash outs have characterised the last 10 years of cybercrime, new techniques are becoming part of the criminal arsenal while firms invest more and more in cyber threat intelligence in the hope of keeping up," adds Ferbrache, "in 2016 we predict that organised crime groups will become increasingly selective in targeting high net worth individuals, corporate treasuries and commercial bank accounts."

However terrorism will increasingly concentrate on cyber attacks warns Ferbrache. “Terrorist organisations are becoming more and more tech savvy exploiting the internet for propaganda, radicalisation and communications," he says, “2016 is likely to be the year that cyber resilience starts to matter more than just cyber protection, as governments worry about systemic risks from cyber attacks and critical infrastructure firms start to pay more attention to just how resilient their business models really are to these new threats. The NIST cyber security framework will succeed in becoming the de-facto yardstick for cyber security amongst such firms.”


The problem with hacking is that everyone does it - governments, bankers, companies, criminals, terrorists, pranksters, funsters and geeks with nothing better to do. Even Q in the latest Bond film is a hacker. So, in a world with such a  morally ambivalent attitude to hacking, how can the law decide who's a goodie and who's a baddie?

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