28 July 2024

The battle to win the trillion-dollar cybercrime war

Paul Merrill

Cybercrime expert Foo Siang-tse is under no illusions as to the size of the challenge ahead for global businesses as the crypto-jackers, phishers and malware trojans refine their art and mount ever more brutal attacks to steal data, gain intelligence or paralyze entire networks.

“The threats are only moving in one direction,” Foo tells The CEO Magazine from the Singapore office of South-East Asia’s leading IT services provider NCS, where he heads up the Asia–Pacific cybersecurity division.

“They’re getting more sophisticated and more dangerous. The criminals are no different from what you see on The Godfather – they’re extremely well organized and very commercially driven.”

So driven, in fact, that cybercrime will be a US$10.5 trillion a year industry by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. That’s US$333,000 per second – triple its value in 2015 – and greater than the gross domestic products of Germany, Japan, India and the United Kingdom.

According to a survey by CyberEdge Group last year, 84.7 percent of organizations had been victims of a successful attack during the previous 12 months, despite spiralling IT security budgets.

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