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cybercrime
On Consumer Rights Day, we're reminded that the digital marketplace is where scams, fraud and identity theft flourish.
Cybercrime and significant breaches have plagued various sectors in the past five years in financial, retail, healthcare, entertainment, and government. For many, 2016 will go down as the year that computer hackers affected the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
Stories of increasingly vicious cyber-attacks have dominated the headlines this year. It seems like every day we wake up to news of another attack on the scale of the Yahoo data breach, the Democratic National Committee hack, or the NSA source code leak.
When we consider the range of cyber-threats, we generally imagine external attackers -- foreign states, criminal underworlds or lone script kiddies. But the reality is that a large proportion of vulnerabilities and "threats" that organizations face today come from legitimate network users.
If anything, the modern threat landscape encourages attacks on small, vulnerable businesses. And 60 per cent of the time, those small businesses will go under within six months of a cyber-attack. So while massive data breaches dominate the news, they only scratch the surface.
The evidence clearly points to the need for Canadian SMBs to increase their awareness of threats and ability to detect them, especially as they look to grow. Keeping these points in mind, there is always room for improvements in cyber policies and procedures, product selection and education because it doesn't look like cyber threats will be subsiding in the near future.
Technology plays a large part in the lives of everyone; it's where we communicate, learn, express ourselves and spend much of our leisure time, but what does it look like when the primary medium we use for these things becomes corrupted with hate and abuse?
Earlier this year, a group of cyber criminals targeted two Canadian financial institutions with a hybrid type of malware, GozNym. The first time GozNym was ever seen, it stole millions of dollars from the unnamed Canadian financial institutions along with several U.S. banks.
Concerns are warranted as drones continue to grow in popularity. Individuals and organizations are being vigilant in their need to detect, protect and respond quickly to security and privacy issues.
Ransomware is one of the fastest growing areas of cyber crime. The intended target is often small and medium sized businesses, because they have fewer resources compared with larger organizations. Historically, the root word ransom refers to a criminal demanding a payment in exchange for releasing someone or something that has been taken.
