by Angela Guess
Joon Ian Wong recently wrote in Quartz, “Hackers are getting better and businesses are increasingly at risk, according to a new report from global security consultants PwC. Worryingly for corporate digital security chiefs, this problem is expected to get worse as the Internet of Things gains in popularity. Here’s how bad corporate cybercrime is right now: The number of detected security incidents climbed 38% in 2015 compared to a year earlier, according to PwC, and has been growing at a steady double-digit clip over the last five years. The total number of incidents captured in the survey now stands at 59 million, although the true figure is likely to be much higher. ‘The numbers have become numbing … prevention and detection methods have proved largely ineffective,’ says the PwC report. These digital break-ins cost the global economy somewhere between $375 to $575 billion a year, according to a 2014 study (PDF) by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.”
Wong goes on, “Breaches originating from cloud-connected devices devices jumped by 152% in 2015 compared to a year earlier, PwC says. That’s hacking of things like wearables, ‘smart’ lighting systems and other embedded sensors in the corporate environment. And over the next five years, the world of such devices, or ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is expected to grow from 13 billion devices to 30 billion, according to research firm IDC. That means there will be a lot more devices to hack. The highly vulnerable nature of current IoT devices is the subject of a forthcoming report by Spanish carrier Telefónica. John Moor, an author of the report and director of the IoT Security Foundation, tells Quartz that insufficient regulatory oversight and safety standards from manufacturers are some of the reasons why IoT will be hacker-prone.”
photo credit: PwC