Tag: Galix Networking

In today's digital landscape, cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and targeted. While organisations invest in advanced anti-malware and threat detection software, they often overlook a critical variable in their security posture: people.

Utility providers are traditionally an attractive target for cybercriminals, evident by the number of high-profile attacks, both globally and locally, in recent years. In fact, the ransomware supply chain attack on the Colonial Pipeline in 2021 became the largest attack in US history, with the payment of a $4.4 million ransom.

While phishing scams are nothing new and have not changed drastically since their inception several years ago, we have seen some changes in terms of the techniques used, as well as the sophistication of content. From a tech perspective, the general technology used to pull off these social engineering attacks remains the same.

The cyberthreat landscape is constantly evolving, as cybercriminals continue to find vulnerabilities to exploit. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are a growing concern that businesses need to guard against. While these highly targeted attacks are as common as more broadly-targeted events, they are devastating when successful, exposing sensitive data that could ruin business reputation, not to mention causing compliance breaches.

While the lifting of international travel restrictions, put in place in early 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19, would be great news for the travel industry and the wider economy, the move would likely further exacerbate the already critical shortage of cybersecurity skills in South Africa.

This year has seen many more businesses moving online, adopting ecommerce models in an effort to continue to reach their customers as COVID-19 wreaked havoc. While this has opened up markets to hundreds of thousands of new customers, it also has the potential to create vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit.

In terms of risk versus reward, cybercrime is a highly lucrative industry. Research from Atlas VPN suggests that cyberattacks generate more than $1.5 trillion in revenue each year, and this figure is growing.

Cybercrime attacks are accelerating in frequency and increasing in sophistication every year for one simple reason – they are highly lucrative when successful, so the payoff is worth the effort. In 2019 we saw a number of high-profile attacks in South Africa, which made headlines for the sheer disruptiveness they created.

Simeon Tassev | Managing Director and QSA | Galix Networking | simeon@galix.com | www.galix.com | Ahead of the pending enforcement of the Protection of Personal...

Simeon Tassev | MD and QSA, Galix Networking | https://www.galix.com/ | simeon@galix.com |  2016 was undoubtedly a challenging year for information security with huge data leaks, ransomware, and Internet-of-Things...