Are the billions spent on cyber security worth it?

In 2015 alone, small and medium-sized organizations spent more than $70 billion, across the world, on security software to protect their documentations, data and systems. The amount is expected to grow about 5% annually, according to analysts worldwide. The billions of dollars spent on cyber security does not include the colossal amounts of money spent on the prevention of fraud by financial institutions, a figure that is generally underreported and expected to reach into excessive billions year on year.

                          Image source : Pixabay

The question here is, whether all the spending made by these corporations has made documentation and data systems any more secure for the private sector? Has personal data and customer information has become any safer?

The answer is no, according to most analysts worldwide, but the reason is not that the latest software is ineffective, rather the growth of hackers and malicious agents have increased.

In recent times, software built to protect data systems and documentation has become increasingly sophisticated, but so have the rise in data hacks. In the last two years itself, documentation breaches have exponentially soared and one of the most concerning issues is ransomware. In ransomware, the hackers who steal sensitive information demand payment to return the data back to the original owner.

Cyber security is increasingly becoming a huge challenge as hackers are finding novel means of breaking through existing security software, particularly in signature-based antivirus software. In signature-based antivirus software, signatures of files on the system are compared to a list of known harmful files, while the use of behavior-based antivirus observes the procedures in a system for indications of malware and then compares those indications against obvious malevolent demeanors.

A number of analysts are concerned about a growing list of issues that most organizations have not yet acknowledged. These include:

• Companies have yet to deploy new processes and approaches such as security analytics to discover suspicious issues. Security analytics refers to assembling and connecting various kinds of security event information and employing sophisticated techniques such as machine-learning and neural network models.
• The rapid advancement of cloud computing has invariably placed classified organizational information beyond the more protected environments of a data center.
• Employees are increasingly failing to accurately monitor security software or set up adequate secure cyber security policies.

Organizations these days are highly vulnerable as compared to a decade ago because the world has now become far more complex in many ways. Although companies as safer in a number of ways, cyber criminals can still get through if policies are not correctly implemented or adequate safety is not properly executed.

In spite of millions of dollars being spent on antivirus software, smart criminals can still manage to find a way of hacking into sensitive data.

Image source: Pixabay

Although the tools are easily available for document protection and identity safety, small and medium companies are not doing nearly as much as they should be doing with security. In a number of cases it has been seen that human error is the greatest risk factor to data protection. Some employees might click on a document that they shouldn’t have and it infects the entire system from within. Although the company would have spent colossal amounts in safeguarding against outside dangers, a simple email containing a hack could easily bypass every external safety measure.

In order to keep data and document safe within the private sector, it will be important to keep up with the world of constantly evolving cyber security and constantly change processes on priority basis.