In terms of cybersecurity, the last 12 months have been a roller coaster. Everything is broken in cybersecurity; it's just a question of discovering it, and it seemed like everything broke at the same time this year, especially at the end. But, for better or worse, we will finish the year knowing more than we did at the start.
Looking back at the last year and what we Understand.
* Downtime, not ransom payments, is how ransomware damages organisations
Malware that encrypts files is still a major problem. Ransomware has taken down entire cities, halted salaries, and created gasoline shortages this year alone, with entire corporate networks held for ransom in exchange for millions of dollars in cryptocurrency payments. Ransomware operators, according to the US Treasury, are worth an estimated $1.5 billion. According to the US Treasury, ransomware operators are expected to generate more money from ransom payments in 2021 than they did in the previous decade. However, data reveals that organisations suffer the largest costs due to delayed productivity and the time-consuming effort of cleaning up after a ransomware attack, which includes incident response and legal assistance.
* The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the authority to require mobile spyware producers to notify their victims.
Following an order from the Federal Trade Commission in September, SpyFone became the first spyware producer to be banned in the United States. The FTC accused the manufacturer of the "stalkerware" software of developing the stealthy virus to provide stalkers and domestic abusers real-time access to data on their victims' phones, such as messages and location information, without their knowledge. SpyFone was also ordered by the FTC to destroy all of the data it had "illegally" gathered and to tell users whose phones had been hacked by its software for the first time.
* Information security In comparison to the previous year, VC financing increased by a factor of two.
In terms of cybersecurity venture capital financing, 2017 was a record-breaking year. During the first half of 2021, investors had put $11.5 billion into venture capital. That's more than double the $4.7 billion spent the previous year over the same time period. Transmit Security raised $543 million in a Series A round, and Lacework raised $525 million in a Series D round. Cloud computing, security consultancy, and risk and compliance, according to investors, helped drive the investments.
* Gagging orders are served in one-third of all legal demands for Microsoft user data.
It's no secret that tech firms are among the largest keepers of user data, and they're also a regular target of government data requests seeking evidence for criminal investigations. However, Microsoft warned this year of a rising trend in which the government attaches secrecy restrictions to search warrants, preventing the business from informing users when their data is being investigated.
According to Microsoft's consumer security head Tom Burt, one-third of all judicial orders include confidentiality clauses, many of which are "unsupported by any serious legal or factual analysis." According to Microsoft, confidentiality orders are common throughout the computer sector.
* The FBI was given permission to break into private networks in order to clean up after a cyber assault.
The FBI initiated a first-of-its-kind operation in April to eliminate back doors left by hackers in hundreds of U.S. firm email systems. China was eventually accused for the widespread exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Exchange email platform, which the hackers exploited to access thousands of enterprise email servers throughout the United States in order to steal contact lists and mailboxes. The intrusions exposed thousands of servers, leading corporations to race to patch the holes, but the updates failed to remove a backdoor left behind, allowing the hackers to quickly regain access.
A federal judge in Texas approved the operation, authorising the FBI to use the same vulnerabilities as the hackers to remove the back doors, worrying that they might be used again by criminal actors. Other governments have conducted similar "hack and patch" operations to eliminate botnets in the past, but this is the first time the FBI has efficiently cleaned up private networks following a cyber attack.
* Unemployment benefit scammers are targeting vehicle insurance websites.
This year, many vehicle insurance firms were targeted for an unusual, but more popular, fraud. Metromile stated that a weakness in their website that was used to store insurance quotations was exploited to collect driving licence numbers. Then, months later, Geico revealed that it, too, had been attacked and had its driver licence details scraped.
According to Geico's data breach warning, fraudsters used the stolen licence numbers to "falsely claim for unemployment benefits in your name." It turns out that many jurisdictions in the United States require a driver's licence before you can qualify for state unemployment benefits, which is why vehicle insurance firms were targeted.
