Cyber Security Lacks Conclusive Strategy

Cyber security has no endgame, according to research officer and industry veteran, F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen.

He said at London’s Wired Security conference:

“We will always have cyber security problems because we will always have bad people, which means job security in security is likely to continue forever.”

Cyber criminals are constantly evolving their capabilities and methods in stealing and monetising data, which can be hard to keep up with. Hypponen continued:

“Attackers will always have the upper hand because they have the luxury of time to study our defences, while defenders do not have that luxury, so it is an unfair contest – a never-ending race.”

Hypponen, whose career spans 25 years, said that the most crucial thing to understand is the enemy. However, he added that while that was easy enough to do that at one time, this is no longer the case, with most businesses being faced with multiple attackers.

He said that each is looking to achieve a certain purpose, whether criminals, nation state actors, or hacktivists.

For the majority of businesses though, it is typically criminals that are targeting them. Hypponen noted that 95% of the malware samples (between 350,000 and 450,000) that F-Secure observes daily, come from organised crime groups.

UK SMEs have to stay on top of the latest threats to truly understand what they are up against. One way in which to do that is to create cyber security threat jobs in order to have someone on the payroll who understands how hackers work and, more importantly, can defend the business against their criminal activities.