Cybercrime: The Growing Threat and Strategies for Adaptation - Essay Sample

Introduction

In recent years, cybercrimes have been affecting most digital technology, making it a significant threat. As technology advance, cybercriminals also develop new techniques that they use to manipulate user data. Cases of identity frauds, holding ransom to computers, account access, malware, among others, have therefore increased as the technology advance. Therefore, these have forced every organization to look for better ways to adapt to the new cybersecurity management strategies. Worldwide most of the countries are still behind the rise with some of them, including the developed countries such as Russia and North Korea being subject to the crime.

As the threats rise, defense tactics have also been put in place to fight against cybercrime, with countries such as the United state investing in time and resources to ensure their defense strategies are active (Husák et al., 2018). The United Kingdom and different organizations such as NATO have also begun fighting against cybersecurity through budgets and resource allocation to ensure that their data is safe. In 2016, the United Kingdom declared a plan to fight the Cyberthreats by allocating £1.9 billion in a five-year plan (Taddeo, 2017). These preparations are vital, but the criminals are sometimes ahead of the always kept preparations.

Literature review

Every day in the United States, more than 4000 ransomware attacks are sent to different targets, used to encrypt systems until the user pays a specific amount of money to release it (Taddeo & Floridi, 2018). Cybercriminals have managed to intrude on organization activities, clearing appointments, and other important daily activities for the organization to run. The global damage brought about by the cyber-attacks has risen from five billion dollars from 2017 and is estimated to reach six trillion by the year 2021 (Pour et al., 2019). The data show how the world is in danger with no country or organization being named to be safe from the cyber-attacks.

In recent years, technological advancement has changed the way of life and what we believed five years ago. With deepfake technology, it is easy to create hyper-realistic images or videos to swap faces without leaving any trace (Westerlund, 2019). Technology has now being used to blackmail people and other illegal activities online or on social media. The attackers use their target pictures and generate videos with a person saying something or even pornographic materials. Everyone with a computer can manage to use this technology, therefore leaving the world to be in a dark place where everyone is in danger.

In recent years it has been stated that our homes are in danger or our home network is in threat. Everything in our homestead today is mainly powered by online technology, with more than 69% of our household owning a smart device (Micro, 2020). Routers are mainly at high risk working as gateways to our home network, making more than 83% of the devices vulnerable (Pour & Bou-Harb, 2018). The study shows how the world is becoming open to everyone being in danger without their concern while thinking that they are modern. All these raise questions that require answers since both our homes and business are in threats that need to be tackled in every way possible.

Future development/ Discussion

As the cyber-attacks increase impacting different sectors, development has been made, most of them improving earlier methods of data protection (Choo, 2011). New and advanced methods such as strong AV use where devices are patched to ensure that they are secure. Smartphones in an organization and personal use have been used as the gateway by the cyber attackers; protecting our devices will always reduce the threats. Ensuring that devices run on the latest software update is also one of the best ways that users have been advised and instructed to follow. Updates always ensure that the new techniques of fighting cyber-attacks have been used in place as per time (Bushby, 2019).

Detection of any cyber threat has been considered the best method for data protection than a device fighting the attack (Hart et al., 2020). It advisable that every organization use cyber-attack detection techniques, which will prevent access and alert the system admin in any case of a threat. Monitoring the system and all activities that are going on is very important because most of the time, the network cannot stand some of the threats that emerge. Therefore, the involvement of detection control and access control in any network will improve security by ensuring that the system is alert.

Conclusion

Cyber-attacks have always been a threat to organizational advancement and information management all over the world. Everyday cases of data loss are always reported with everyone being in charge of their security. Technology advancement has greatly influenced the advancement of cyber-attacks providing criminals with platforms and tools. All these have made it hard to combat and win the war against the cyber-criminals. Therefore, it is vital to understand the threats and dangers that being ignorant can cause and the best techniques to be secure. Therefore, the government and private institutions should never stop working on the project and the plans they have in ensuring that the fight against cyber-attacks has been won.

References

Bushby, A. (2019). How deception can change cyber security defences. Computer Fraud & Security, 2019(1), 12-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1361-3723(19)30008-9

Choo, K. K. R. (2011). The cyber threat landscape: Challenges and future research directions. Computers & Security, 30(8), 719-731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2011.08.004

Hart, S., Margheri, A., Paci, F., & Sassone, V. (2020). Risk: A Serious Game for Cyber Security Awareness and Education. Computers & Security, 101827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2020.101827

Husák, M., Neshenko, N., Pour, M. S., Bou-Harb, E., & Celeda, P. (2018). Assessing internet-wide cyber situational awareness of critical sectors. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (pp. 1-6). https://doi.org/10.1145/3230833.3230837

Micro, T. (2020). Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: 2019 to 2020 Trends, from https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/20/a/the-everyday-cyber-threat-landscape-trends-from-2019-to-2020.html.

Pour, M. S., & Bou-Harb, E. (2018). Implications of theoretic derivations on empirical passive measurements for effective cyber threat intelligence generation. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) (pp. 1-7). IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/ICC.2018.8422720

Pour, M. S., Bou-Harb, E., Varma, K., Neshenko, N., Pados, D. A., & Choo, K. K. R. (2019). Comprehending the IoT cyber threat landscape: A data dimensionality reduction technique to infer and characterize Internet-scale IoT probing campaigns. Digital Investigation, 28, S40-S49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2019.01.014

Taddeo, M. (2017). Deterrence by norms to stop interstate cyber attacks. Minds and Machines, 27(3), 387-392. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-017-9446-1

Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2018). Regulate artificial intelligence to avert cyber arms race. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04602-6/

Westerlund, M. (2019). The emergence of deepfake technology: A review. Technology Innovation Management Review, 9(11). https://timreview.ca/article/1282