“It’s bows and arrows against the lightning”
– H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds
A $190 BILLION SECURITY MARKET REQUIRES DISRUPTION
There is a worldwide crisis for small businesses
The universal level of website insecurity and the real costs associated with data breaches and cybercrime are shocking: 48% of businesses reported a cyber attack in the year 2022, up from 43% last year.
Cybercrime costs organizations an incredible $1.79M every minute, according to RiskIQ’s ‘Evil Internet Minute Report’. Their study, which analyzed the volume of malicious activity on the internet, laid bare the scale and damage of cyber-attacks in the past year, finding that 648 cyber threats occurred every minute. The researchers calculated that the average cost of a breach is $7.2 per minute, while the overall predicted cybersecurity spend is $280,060 every minute.
If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2022 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. Research by Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.
Existing Solutions Are Being Overrun
SMB’s have reported that about 80% of exploits and malware have evaded their firewalls and antivirus solutions. This is because these solutions fail to protect against zero day attacks (attacks exploiting a new vulnerability introduced in a new version of e.g. a website CMS or plugin).
In Q4 2021, zero-day exploits were involved in 66% of malware. It should be noted also that all figures about attacks are expected to be on the lower side than reality as it takes businesses about 279 days in average to detect a breach on their network. Also, cybercrimes are vastly undercounted also because they aren’t reported — due to embarrassment, fear of reputational harm, and the notion that law enforcement can’t help.
Security threats and attacks against websites are increasing at exponential rates year over year and cybersecurity products cannot keep up with the distributed global nature of hacker bots attacking websites. Also, cybersecurity positions remain under-qualified and understaffed. The number of positions not filled was around 3.5 million in 2021 and the same number is predicted until 2025.
The large money to be gained by hacking sites (crypto mining, stealing credentials, data mining, ransomware, etc.) encourages innovative solutions via hackers using distributed bot networks.
Regardless of size, from the largest corporation site to a humble blogger website there is currently no incentive or framework to work together to share trusted threat and attack knowledge. There is no possibility they can be rewarded to share data of attacks on their sites and gain extra protection in return and financial rewards for the new protection that can be generated from machine learning on the Big Data. To fight the global threat, websites should be sharing this vital threat intelligence, contributing to a global self-learning firewall to stop the hackers in their tracks. SharkGate will enable this. All based on an incentive model that paves a purely utility-driven path forward towards better protection against the hackers.
A Game Changer Is Needed
The only winners in this current status quo are the hackers and large security vendors.
It is clear that incremental improvements by existing security vendors are not sufficient to secure websites and protect the businesses behind them. It is time for a disruptive solution to radically change the website cybersecurity field forever. We believe that SharkGate is in a unique position to be the catalyst for a major change. To use its experience and leading expertise in the field to create a new era in website protection and cyber security intelligence services. Moving to the situation where an attack on one site enables a global immunity to be immediately developed to protect all sites in the network from similar attacks. Where a solution does not depend on one solitary party or some paid subscription, but instead a network of websites who all contribute to the evolving of the firewall, everybody profits, and actually uses the power of the hackers’ own attacks against themselves.