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No matter how much money, tools, and resources companies and technology giants spend on their cybersecurity, criminals always seem to find a way to break into their system. In 2019, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that his company would spend $3.7 billion on safety and security. However, Facebook’s efforts did not protect Facebook’s users, as they still fell victim to numerous cyber-attacks last year. In 2020, one of the most notable cyberattacks involved Facebook, when more than 267 million profiles appeared on the Dark Web. (Forbes)

Cybercriminals endlessly try and get through security firewalls and infect systems and exfiltrate data. However, this is not a reason to drop your guard and wait for an inevitable attack from online hackers. To give businesses an insight into the cybersecurity industry, we’ve compiled some trends and important stats for 2021.

 

2021 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch Out For

As we start the second quarter of 2021, the remnants of 2020 as the most challenging year for digital transformation are still upon us. The quick transition of most businesses to remote working presented new security vulnerabilities as they struggled to support a larger remote workforce. This required a fast transition to new technology with limited time to establish proper cybersecurity protocols.  Additionally, security research suggests most US companies have inadequate cybersecurity protocols in place, to begin with. As pandemic restrictions begin to roll back, many companies will begin to readjust again to a different working environment. With that in mind, here are some industry trends to watch out for in 2021.

  • Cybercriminals will continue to target remote workers.
  • Besides cyber-attacks and malware infections, data loss will be a top concern in cloud computing.
  • The lack of skilled cybersecurity professionals remains an issue.
  • As IoT devices proliferate, vulnerabilities to cyber-attack will also proliferate.
  • Phishing attacks will become more prevalent.

 

15 Cybersecurity Statistics and Facts That Should Not Be Ignored

The rapid growth of the cybersecurity industry results in more and more criminals adapting to new security protocols to sow terror in the business industry. Businesses must be more resilient to withstand any disruption that can harm their data and their client’s data. As hackers evolve and cybersecurity protocols continue to evolve, there are some important statistics that businesses should keep in mind:

  1. Human error is the root cause of 95% of cybersecurity breaches. –Cybint
  2. 88% of organizations worldwide struggled with spear-phishing attempts in 2019. –Proofpoint
  3. Data breaches disclosed 36 billion sensitive pieces of data in the first half of 2020. –RiskBased
  4. 86% of data breaches were financially motivated while 10% were motivated by espionage. –Verizon
  5. 45% of breaches featured hacking, 17% involved malware and 22% involved phishing. -Verizon
  6. 37% of malicious email attachments are .doc and .dot. -Symantec
  7. In 2020, the average cost of data breaches ballooned to $3.86 million. –IBM
  8. 58% of data breaches in 2020 involved personal data. -Verizon
  9. The 2020 Twitter breach targeted 130 accounts including Joe Biden’s and Elon Musk’ –CNBC
  10. The average ransomware payment surged by 33% in 2020 compared to 2019 –Fintech News
  11. Emails deliver 94% of malware –CSO Online
  12. Phishing attacks increased in 2020 to account for 1 in every 4,200 emails –Symantec
  13. Cyberattacks on IoT devices skyrocketed in 2018 and surpassed 300% in 2019. (Forbes)
  14. 69% of organizations believe that cyber threats can be blocked by anti-virus software -Ponemon Institutes Cost of Data Breach Study
  15. 60% of malicious domains are associated with spam campaigns –Cisco

 

What Are Hackers After?

Data is the ultimate attack surface. Hackers want your data for a variety of reasons.  Essentially, they want to use your data to monetize it themselves. This is a zero-sum game — when the hacker monetizes your data, it reduces your ability to monetize your data.  Hacks beget further hacks, mostly of sensitive data, emails, phone numbers, or personal interests, making the situation just that much harder to recover from.  The worst part, after a hack you might not ever figure out why or how your monetization efforts lagged, or even failed.  Regardless, hacks almost always come down to data, as the Navy’s Chief Data officer said, “Adversaries are not stealing our networks; they’re stealing the data on the network”.

Sertainty specializes in protecting your data, and by association your privacy.

 

Sertainty: Data Privacy That’s No Secret

The Sertainty Data Privacy Platform does away with the unsustainable, indirect approaches to data privacy of the past. It instead puts data in charge of its own destiny.

Here at Sertainty, we take data privacy and protection seriously, as this is the most valuable asset of any business. With Sertainty, businesses can be assured that their data privacy is certain, provable, and manageable by building data privacy intelligence directly into their data. The Sertainty Data Privacy Platform empowers data to defend, govern, and track itself, so data privacy isn’t lost when the traditional measure of application, network, and infrastructure security fails. Data breaches are inevitable. With Sertainty, privacy loss doesn’t have to be.