The Market Downturn’s Impact on Cyber Crime

The Market Downturn’s Impact on Cyber Crime

Cyber attacks cyber threats seem to be quieter at the moment. Why is that. That’s a great question Emily. It does seem that way. I don’t know that that’s actually the case. I think what’s happening is that we haven’t seen these mega breaches posted in the news. That’s usually good news actually that we are not seeing as many of these massive leaks in the news. But the reality is that there is a new ransomware victim posted online with their data that are being extorted every four hours. We see big new victims being posted on leak sites. But you are reporting there could be an uptick in cyber crime because of the deteriorating situation in the economy. And we’ve been reporting throughout the show. More bad news whether it’s results from Alphabet or Microsoft or Wal-Mart or Shopify. Talk to us about how this could have all have an impact on cybercrime. Yeah it will. What we see is that whenever there is money to be made there are certainly criminals that are attracted to that opportunity. So in over 600 cases a unit 42 investigated. Last year we saw payment requests as high as 30 million US dollars in ransom more cases and the average is nine hundred twenty five thousand US dollars. So we’re almost at a million dollars as an average payment. There is a tremendous amount of money to be made. And to your point there is still a much lower barrier to entry for the criminal side than it is for the defense side. Another interesting statistic that we identify that relates to that is that the average dwell time meaning how long an attacker is in an environment before they go unnoticed is twenty eight days. That means the longer they’re in an environment the more damage they can cause. And that damage directly translates to the more amounts of money that they can receive on the back end. I want to ask you about China. We’re preparing for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan. The Chinese government not happy about this. At the same time we’re seeing Alibaba prepare for a stock listing in Hong Kong. I’m curious if you’re expecting rising U.S. China attention to potentially lead to an increase in cybercrime as well. So I think the reality is you know diplomatic ties are not right. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of intellectual property theft coming from different nation states throughout the world. China is an org. It is a nation state that certainly alongside so many other countries has gone back and forth with the United States on that. So in addition to ransom or cage cases which we spoke about one of the largest cases we see our business e-mail compromised. And we do see there’s an interesting amount of overlap between these cases and certainly nation state activity. I think as recent as last week we saw a North Korean our team released research related to North Korean threat activity related to ransomware cases. So I don’t think cyber criminal activity is going away anytime soon whether it’s at the economic crime actor or whether it’s from a nation state capacity. We will continue to see more of it. And what’s the relationship with the crypto market. Obviously we’ve seen extreme volatility in the crypto market. And as I understand it that can also be tied to a two ransomware. Well so what. I think you see it are just massive amounts of money that are to be made in cyber crime and certainly cryptocurrency has been one economic source. It is really fueled that. So when we look at business e-mail compromise in the FBI stat points us out as 43 billion dollars U.S. dollars of losses that have been occurred over the last six years. In these cases when you compare that to what we’re seeing payments made last year for our clients alone upwards of eight million U.S. dollars there’s certainly a lot of money that’s transacting and much of that is occurring over cryptocurrency. You know I think there’s certainly a lot of pressure going on from the U.S. government and working with so many international governments to make it more difficult for cyber criminals to use cryptocurrency as easily and as readily as they have in the past. And we’re hoping that continues to have a positive impact for organizations throughout the world.