Despite the push to encourage people into the cybersecurity industry, attacks are increasing exponentially throughout the world. If you’ve had your eye on the news, you’ll have noticed some major breaches so far this year, one of the most prominent being the Conti ransomware attack in Costa Rica. For two months Costa Rico has been under siege from two major attacks, crippling the country’s essential services and millions of dollars being lost due to the attacks. It became so bad that their government declared a national emergency.

Conti Ransomware

Conti ransomware was first detected in 2020. It is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), which is tech talk for holding your data hostage until you pay off the attackers. It’s been associated with Russian-speaking cybercrime actors and has claimed to have compromised at least 500 organisations worldwide, including Australian critical infrastructure in the healthcare and energy sectors.

Other attacks

Costa Rica isn’t the only country affected. Since the beginning of the year, some of the biggest attacks include:

• Crypto.com, who’s two-factor authentication was circumvented, losing $18 million in Bitcoin and $15 million of Ethereum.
• Microsoft, attacked by a group called Lapsus$, compromising multiple products including Cortana and Bing.
• News Corp who was breached by an unknown hacker, stealing emails containing sensitive information from its journalists.
• Red Cross, once again attacked by an unknown source, having over half a million records compromised and sensitive data stolen.

These are just a handful, but there are so many more.

DDos attacks

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of Internet traffic. This real-time map by Netscout is one of many that shows just how many threats are out there. And just remember, DDoS are just one type of attack!

Looking at these stats is pretty scary considering we’re only halfway through the year. Yet what’s even more terrifying is the following statistics:

• In 93% of cases, external attackers are able to breach an organisation’s network and gain access to their local network.
• Ransomware cost the world $20 billion in 2021, with that figure expected to rise to $265 billion by 2031.
• Organisations experienced a ransomware attack every 11 seconds in 2021, with expectations this will increase to an attack every 2 seconds by 2031.

So, what can we do to help the world catch up with the cyber criminals? The short answer is to get more people into cybersecurity roles. However, we know it’s not really that simple. We not only need to encourage people to jump into the industry but take the time to learn the skills necessary to help stop the ever-increasing gap between our security and oncoming attacks.

Thankfully, there are plenty of places offering courses to upskill and reskill yourself or your employees. CTIA is one such company who specialises in this area, with one of our most popular courses being the Cyber Security Analyst program. At the end of the course, you’ll come out with a Certificate IV in Cyber Security and a good baseline to be able to jump into the industry.

So, if you, or someone you know is into tech, the industry needs you! One could even say the world needs you.