EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
If we go back to the beginning of cybercrime , we visualize the teenagers in the basement of their family home , driven by curiosity and the challenge of finding out if they could get into a secure system . Starting with hacking into the AT & T phone system using toy whistles to employees using inside access to embezzle money .
The first computer virus came out in 1982 which was a prank devised by a 15-year-old , then the first malicious code in the guise of the Morris worm was created by a Cornell graduate student and infected about 6,000 computers . 20,000 attendees of the 1989 World Health Organizations AIDS Conference experienced the first instance of ransomware deployed from a floppy disk asking for US $ 189 in exchange for the decryption key .
In 1999 , the first mass emailing virus interrupted over a million email accounts across the globe causing an estimated US $ 80 million in damages . The first juvenile hacker was jailed in 2000 for hacking into NASA , the Pentagon and the Department of Defense just for the challenge . But in 2010 , we saw Chinese hackers steel Google ’ s intellectual property in a sophisticated attack which was both criminal and disruptive .
2014 saw 56 million credit cards compromised from Home Depot customers , then 83 million accounts compromised at JP Morgan Chase . 79 million Anthem accounts were compromised in 2015 and in 2017 the global WannaCry ransomware was unleashed to the world causing considerable chaos across the globe , affecting more than 150 countries and over 300,000 people .
Not happy with that , cybercriminals moved their focus to universities where in 2018 we saw 144 US and 176 outside-the-US universities attacked by Iranian hackers . Why ? To steal over US $ 3 billion in intellectual property . In 2019 , 540 million records were stolen from Facebook users and in 2020 , CAM4 had its server breached with over 10 billion records exposed . 2021 gave us the Russian-led SolarWinds cyberattack that spread to its clients , undetected for months and we have just seen the fall out of the recent cyberattack on the US oil and gas pipeline with global implications .
The history of cyberattacks ( and these are only the tip of the iceberg ) provides us with a clear change in behavior from innocent curiosity to intentional criminal activity and cyber warfare .
The motivation shifted in 2013 when Target was breached during the Christmas shopping season . Hackers obtained about 40 million credit card and debit cards by using stolen credentials they obtained from a third-party vendor .
There is no doubt that the behavior of cybercriminals has become extremely dangerous and will only get worse . p
The numbers kept on rising with over 500 million Yahoo users finding themselves victim to their account details and personal identifiable information being hacked . Having realized the potential for incredible financial gain , cybercriminals focused on finding ways to steal as many financial details and as much personal identifiable information as possible . The added bonus is that these details can be sold multiple times to other cybercriminals .
JACQUELINE JAYNE , SECURITY AWARENESS
ADVOCATE APAC AT KNOWBE4
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO APAC 35