- Cyber resilience.
What is it?
The Miriam-Webster Dictionary says
resilience is the ability to become successful again
after something bad happens.
Why do we need to focus on resilience now?
Well, online attackers are stealing more from us
than ever before
so our ability to detect and respond
to a cyber attack is just as important
as trying to block it in the first place.
Over the past several years
the volume of data breaches has been increasing.
The average cost of a large company data breach
is now $8.2 million.
Cybersecurity Ventures is predicting that by 2021
the annual cost of cyber crime
will reach $6 trillion globally.
That's sharply up from $3 trillion in 2015.
Why is this happening?
Well, long gone are the days when our main online attacker
was a technologically talented,
but opportunistic teenager,
or a group of online political protesters.
They're both still with us of course,
but criminal attackers are more organized
and better funded than ever.
And they've learned that our security technologies
are very good
so they've shifted their focus
and are now attacking our people and processes.
Consider a newer attack called business email compromise.
This online scam
targets businesses working with foreign suppliers,
and organizations
that regularly perform wire transfer payments.
Here's how it works.
Attackers impersonate a CEO over email
and then try to emotionally manipulate people
into moving their company's money
over to the criminal's offshore bank accounts.
Using this one type of attack,
cyber criminals have created exposed dollar losses
of $26 billion between 2016 and 2019.
Now, consider a newer
and more sophisticated class of attackers,
cyber warriors, whose goal is to steal secrets,
or fight covert cyber battles.
Cyber warriors are funded by countries
like the United States, Russia, and China.
They have the expertise and resources
to defeat even our best technological defenses.
A favorite tactic of theirs
is to discover what are called zero day exploits.
And then create cyber weapons to take advantage of them.
Zero day exploits are serious,
previously unknown flaws in software and devices
that can be exploited by attackers
until they are discovered and fixed by the manufacturer.
Zero day exploits have been discovered
in the most expensive network firewalls
from top vendors like Cisco.
Zero day exploits have also been used
to compromise the freely available
anonymous networking system called The Onion Router, or TOR.
This class of attackers even severely damaged
a uranium enrichment plant in Iran
which wasn't even directly connected to the internet
when it was cyber attacked.
And now, some of these advanced cyber weapons
are falling into private hands.
What does this mean for us?
It means for the next 10 to 15 years,
major cybersecurity breaches are inevitable
for every organization connected to the internet.
We need to be able to efficiently handle them
and keep going
just like when a clever new competitor shows up
or when we lose a major customer or funding source.
So, let's define cyber resilience
as our ability to withstand and quickly recover
from cyberattacks and other cyber-related incidents.
Now that we know why we need it,
we'll include cyber resilience as a goal
in our information security program.