With the escalation in cyber threats, organizations worldwide are increasingly becoming concerned about cybersecurity.
Secure authentication developed by SuperAuth is one of the effective means to prevent cyber threats.
Several surveys have already reported the surge in cyber threats in 2017.
Here, we look at some of them:
1. Data breaches in the US increase at an astounding rate
According to a report by ITRC (Identity Theft Resource Center), the number of data breaches in the US, tracked through June 30, 2017, was reported to be 791 – a half-year record. In comparison to the 2016 figures of the same time period, this year’s data breach state represents a significant jump of 29%.
2. Data breaches in the US by industry sector
The same ITRC report points out that Business is the industry sector which faced 54.7% of the total breaches during the 1st half of 2017. This is a 4.4% rise in the data breach in the industry from what the state was in 2016.
Health/medical is the second-most affected industry represented in the report. The industry has accounted for 22.6% of the total breaches during the 1st half of 2017. Surprisingly, the number is lower than what it was in the same time frame of 2016.
3. Ransomware damage payouts
According to IIDG’s magazine CSO, the costs of damage caused by global ransomware have been predicted to exceed $5 billion in 2017; this is a 15× increase in two years’ time (compared to $325 million in 2015).
The costs include loss of data, post-attack disruption, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hostage data, reputational harm, and employee training.
4. The state of cybersecurity market
According to Cybersecurity Ventures’ “Cybersecurity Market Report,” the global cybersecurity market is predicted to be worth more than $120 billion, which is roughly a 35× growth from 2014.
5. Future cybersecurity spending
With the constant growth of cybercrime, analysts have been finding it increasingly difficult to forecast spending on cybersecurity. The same Cybersecurity Ventures report lays out a prediction that spending on cybersecurity products and services worldwide will exceed $1 trillion over the next five years, starting from 2017.
6. Large-scale data breach at Chipotle food chain
American fast-food chain Chipotle announced on April 25 this year that a data breach affected more than 2,000 of its restaurant locations across 47 states. The company announced that it’s POS system (Point-of-sale) was infected with malware.
The goal of the data breach is to steal the customer’s payment credentials and exploit them before the banks monitor suspicious activity. Although EMV chip cards could increase safety for customers to some extent, they are still vulnerable to the Chipotle-kind of data breach as the malware retrieves information from the magnetic strip and not the embedded microchip.
No Password Authentication
Online customers are also at risk of the threats of data breach as their online account for a particular website (which may contain personal data and credit/debit card details) gets hacked. Integrate SuperAuth, a secure authentication server and an app, which makes website account authentication secure and simple.
To secure the website account SuperAuth offers secure as well as user friendly mobile authentication system that does not require a password to log in to the website.
