This blog post won’t give you solutions but, rather, is intended to shine a light on scary stuff happening in cyberspace right now, for those of you who need a little ammunition for upcoming budget planning sessions.

10 years ago, cybersecurity was not a commonly-used phrase, even within IT departments. Today, the term is not only well-known, but a major concern for organisations of all sizes, in every sector, in every country around the world.

Every day there’s a new horror story on my news feeds.  Massive network breaches.  Data being stolen from major companies.  Personal records compromised.

Some Recent Headlines

In March 2023, the ChatGPT data breach prompted OpenAI, the parent company, to take it off-line until the matter was resolved.

Two others to which most viewers can probably relate are the Twitter and WhatsApp breaches.

Twitter is in the news being accused of covering up a data breach that affected millions of users in the US and EU – and this is in addition to the July 2022 breach that affected millions of accounts at that time.

But the biggest headline grabber of all came on November 16, 2022 when it was revealed that a hacker was selling personal information of some 500 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries on the dark web. This cyber crook claimed to have up-to-date details of 32 million users from the US, 11 million from the UK and 6 million from Germany.

Although the major headlines were about attacks on multinational corporations, mid-size enterprises, those companies with only 100 – 1,000 employees and somewhere between 50 million and $1 billion in annual revenues, have been targeted the most globally, followed closely by smaller enterprises in North America and Europe.

Corporate espionage is often behind attacks, especially nation-state ones, but in over 90% of corporate breaches, employee and client personal data is also stolen.  And then there are the smaller e-criminals who only target individuals. It’s safe to say that no one is really immune to these special breed of virus spreaders.

The increasing scale of attacks

There have been double-digit increases in many quarters, but that’s hard to visualize if you don’t know how the figures have been escalating over time.  Here are a few fun facts to which everyone should be able to relate.

• The cost of cyber crimes was $6 trillion in 2022 and by 2025, that’s only two years from now, expectations are that it will reach $10.5 trillion, that a 175% increase– and phishing will likely be the leading cause of this vulnerability.
• Right now, there is a hacker attack occurring every 39 second in the US alone.
• According to the FBI and Interpol, about 33 billion accounts will be breached in 2023. That’s about 2,328 a day, with 97 cybercrime victims being created each and every hour.
• And according to a 2023 Statista report, 300,000 new pieces malware are created every day – 92% of which are delivered by email. Worse, the average detection period is 49 days.

It’s no wonder then, that globally, corporate leaders rate cyber “incidents”, and the resulting business interruption, as their two biggest risk concerns.

Sectors in the Spotlight

For several years the MUSH sector (that’s municipalities, universities, schools and health are) has been the primary target, with healthcare having the dubious honour of filling the number one spot three out of the past five years. Indeed, 30% of all large data breaches in this time period occurred in hospitals, and there has been a 58% increase in healthcare industry attacks since 2020.

In Canada, the world-famous SickKids Hospital had to go into code grey for two weeks starting on December 18, 2022 because of a ransomware attack. Luckily, not all procedures were cancelled,  and no health records were compromised, but the impact to the children and their families was huge – especially over the holiday,

Not long before that, on September 22, 2022, Optus, which is an Australian telecom company experienced a data breach that gave cyber criminals access to the medical and personal data of 11 million people.  These hackers got names, birth dates, phone numbers, home and email addresses, driver’s licence and passport numbers, along with the Medicare ID.

It’s not all that surprising.  After all, next to getting credentials from high net worth individuals, who have the resources to squash fraudulent activity pretty quickly, the most valuable IDs when creating new identities come from dead people and youngsters. Where better to get this information, but hospitals and, to a certain extent, schools?

How can we be so sure?

As cybersecurity experts, it’s critical that we stay on top of such trends, but we get a little help. Sometimes a lot of help. Cisco, one of our main partners, owns Cisco Talos Intelligence. Talos has the largest threat detection capabilities in the world, with the probable exception of the US military.

Every day Talos receives 100 TB of data, and uses its systems and over 300 full-time threat intelligence researchers, not to mention hundreds of threat intelligence partners, to assess nearly 2 million malware samples, over 600 billion email messages and more than 16 billion Web requests each and every day.

Not only does this rigorous approach ensure that Cisco’s security solutions are highly robust, and that malware and other threat vectors being created and launched in one part of the world can be nipped in the bud before they reach you, but it enables trends to be identified. This includes the industries being targeted.

Cisco is an exceptionally good source of information, but it’s not the only one we rely on. We speak with our other partners, SOC II and DRaaS systems experts, people whose systems have been breached, law enforcement officers, insurance brokers and other industry experts… we even talk to cyber criminals.  Even so, I suspect these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As we said in the outset, scary stats. Scary stuff.