Cybersecurity And The Rise Of The Insider Threat In 2016

By Vijay Basani, CEO, EiQ Networks

Looking back years from now, 2015 may go down in history as the “Year of the Massive Data Breach.” The media reported the fallout from these breaches for months, mainly because the brands were so well known: Anthem, JP Morgan Chase, Sony Networks and Experian/T-Mobile, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), or infamous in the case of Ashley Madison. There were many, many more that weren’t reported because they aren’t household brands. A look at this visualization of the world’s biggest data breaches leads to one question: why are they happening so frequently?

The answer is more obvious than you think: No matter how big or small, nearly every single company depends on the Internet. And because of this reliance, companies are exposed as targets, even those organizations that have a solid IT security policy and technologies in place to prevent a breach. Every organization falls into one of two buckets — either you are already breached or you are going to be breached. There is no organization/business that can state with a straight face that they will never be breached. In fact, the 2015 Verizon Breach Investigative Report shows that small-to-medium-sized enterprises are as likely to be breached as large enterprises.  

More people are going online now than ever before. According to data from the 2013 U.S. Census, nearly 75 percent of U.S. households now use the Internet, which means three-quarters of the U.S. population (320 million) are engaged in online activity. To put this number on a global scale, there are approximately 7 billion individuals, of which nearly than 3.2 billion have Internet access. On the upside, each new Internet user is a potential customer. Consider this statistic: in the first quarter of 2014, nearly 200 million U.S. consumers made online purchases. Each of these online purchases represents an opportunity for a cybercriminal to steal credit card numbers, dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, all of which they can use for nefarious purposes. For businesses, gaining new customers means becoming a bigger target, but no company can afford to ignore the growth opportunities of new markets.

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