Lower Cybercrime Costs! Attack Humans...

This could be a headline on a dark web site for cyber criminals. And it would be correct.

Our colleagues at Wombat did some digging and came up with relevant research you should know about.

The Ponemon Institute recently published their 2017 Cost of Cyber Crime Study and they delivered some sobering statistics that I will not bore you with. The upshot is that we are losing the war on cybercrime. The study noted that the attackers are getting smarter and more organized, and are “finding it easier to scale cybercrime globally.”

And while technology certainly plays a role in these economies of scale, we recently saw in the 2017 edition of The Human Factor, a report by cybersecurity company Proofpoint, evidence that cybercriminals are putting the big money on scaling social engineering–based attacks. In other words, they’re relying more heavily on individual human actions rather than automation and opportunistic vulnerability exploits.

As the Proofpoint report indicates, human actions are increasingly at the root of cybersecurity issues. And as the Ponemon report shows, the cost of those cybersecurity issues is rapidly increasing. Changing the behavior of your employees can help you reduce the costs associated with detection, investigation, remediation, and response to these successful attacks.

The key is to move the dial not only on awareness of social engineering attacks, but also on identification and avoidance. Recognizing that a threat exists is not the same as being able to apply what you have learned, stepping through new-school security awareness training.

I strongly suggest you get a quote for awareness training for your organization and find out how affordable this is. You simply have got to start training and phishing your users ASAP. If you don't, the bad guys will, because your filters never catch all of it. Get a quote now and you will be pleasantly surprised.