Cybersecurity Evangelist says financial cybercrime in 2017 will shift focus to businesses.
Limor Kessem, a top cyber-intelligence expert at IBM Trusteer, expects things to get very intense in 2016 as more organized crime groups step up their presence in the digital realms. Her predictions are worth paying heed to as the trends IBM Security predicted in 2016 exceeded even their own forecasting.
Kessem points out that today’s organized cybercriminals are highly experienced developers, with an average age of 35. These are not the young hackers most of us imagine holed up in their parent’s basements, chugging designer caffeinated drinks, while they sit in front of multiple screens clacking away at their keyboards.
Today’s cybercriminals are often members of organized cybercrime “mobs.” They consist not only of the attackers (hackers) they are also headed by crime bosses and include other criminals who know how to move the stolen funds through the money laundering process.
With larger companies becoming better defended, cybercriminals are moving down to the SMB market. This is bad news for smaller business owners who feel that because their annual revenue is less that the larger organizations, they can cut their security spending. These cybercriminals know that small businesses don’t invest as much in security and they are good at finding weak targets.
In a recent article written by Rob Rudloff, Partner-in-Charge of the Cyber Security Risk Services at RubinBrown, one of the nation’s top 50 accounting and business consulting firms, he recommends a multi-pronged approach to protecting your company against cyber-criminals. Among his tips are to create a culture where it is OK for employees to self-report if they have clicked on something potentially harmful. Rudloff also reminds readers to implement internal controls and to understand that proper technology is part of the overall solution.
The trend of using customized malware and software development expertise, which made 2015 highly profitable for cyber-criminals, will continue in 2016. Industries that can expect to be targeted most often again this year are computer services, retail and healthcare.
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