Chapter 3 : Themes in focus

It is an industry that continues to enjoy exponential growth in line with the rollout of increasingly capable and scaled hardware and software . At the start of the year , US-based tech consulting firm Gartner predicted global spending on information security and risk management will jump to $ 172bn in 2022 , up from $ 155bn in 2021 . Meanwhile , Russian cybersecurity service provider Kaspersky found 85 % of IT decision-makers in North America plan to increase their digital security budget up to 50 % this year .

Underlying these predictions is an altogether worrying spike in cybercrime , with US cybersecurity firm SonicWall finding ransomware attacks more than doubled yearon-year to 623 million incidents in 2021 .

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As Chris Versace , CIO at Tematica Research , told ETF Stream : “ The dark underbelly of our increasing connectivity and digital lifestyle is that there are just more attack vectors for bad actors .”

Versace pointed to society ’ s reliance on more capable systems that are increasingly integrated with our daily lives and personal information such as eCommerce , work-from-home tech , the internet of things , 5G and data centres .

Meanwhile , Aanand Venkatramanan , head of ETF investment strategies at Legal & General Investment Management ( LGIM ), warned more cloudcentric protection is needed , including the continued growth of ID authentication software and hardware . He added more efficient encryption could be called for as blockchain development is used more widely .

Stressing the ability of cyberattacks to create logjams at ports , disruptions in railway networks , power supplies and more , Venkatramanan continued :

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“ What we have seen so far is cyberattacks on businesses , individuals , governments and so on . What we have not seen are attacks that have an immediate impact at a societal level .”

Looking ahead , the number of “ attack vectors ” is only set to increase , with the varying degrees of rollout of autonomous vehicles , telemedicine , the metaverse and later Wi-Fi 6 and 7 and even 6G .

In a more immediate context , digital security has been brought into focus in recent months with Russia ’ s invasion of Ukraine and the aggressive spike in distributed denial-of-service attacks that have accompanied it .

Russia launched datawiping malware which infected “ hundreds ” of computers in Ukraine , Latvia and Lithuania , temporarily disabling Ukrainian government websites and internet access in some areas .

Responding , ‘ hacktivists ’ including the infamous Anonymous group launched attacks against the websites of the Russian military , the Kremlin and Russian propaganda outlet RT News . A subsequent warning issued from the Department of Homeland Security to US businesses then signalled the start of a more proactive approach to cybersecurity risk management . In April , the Securities and

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